What is Yann Martel thinking????

I do not know who Yann Martel is trying to impress but his ongoing stunt makes him look like a socialist fool. My suspicion is that his crowd is not the most clever. Take a look at his proud list.

Without question, these are all marvelous works of literature. What may not be so obvious is that the vast majority of these works were not the product of government subsidization of culture.

What irony! These are the works that Yann Martel holds up to defend the government subsidization of culture!

Here is my open letter to Yann Martel:

Monsieur Martel,

Arrêtez vos bêtises. Vous vous présentiez comme un flâneur snob.

Charles Anthony

Why is Flaherty promoting credit as an economic solution?

Do Canadians really demand credit? or do they simply want money?

I am getting tired of hearing a lot of economic crap from our government. The repeated dogma seems to be “Canadians want credit.” but I do not believe that one bit. I do not hear Canadians asking for credit and even if I did, I would dismiss that Canadian as being crazy or irresponsible.

People need money. People do not need credit. There is a huge difference.

Canadians work hard enough and should keep their own damn money. Taxes should be reduced and the government has to stop inflating the money supply. People need credit like they need a hole in the head.

I wonder why does Flaherty keep repeating that Canadians are demanding credit when such a demand makes no sense. Extending credit only accentuates economic dependence and is an incentive to irresponsibility.

I think we are being deceived. If anybody benefits from extending credit, it will be the lenders first. Ordinary Canadians simply need money and extending credit is not the only way that Canadians can keep more money in their pockets.

Conference Board of Canada spews out nonsense about the recession

How can personal frugality and responsible household spending be bad for the economy? The chief economist at the Conference Board of Canada is spewing out the tired old Keynesian lines. I guess he must think that putting on a smiley happy face is a replacement for economic policy too:

The survey found Canadians say they are financially worse off today than six months ago and expect to be even worse off in six months.

Hodgson said there are sound reasons for Canadians to be depressed about the future, but added that part of the current gloom is psychological since the country has yet to see the deep job losses and economic collapse that has occurred in the United States, Japan and Europe.

“People are now translating that into, ’Geez, maybe I do have to tighten my belt and be more cautious in my spending during this Christmas period,’ ” he said.

“Unfortunately, that just makes things worse. It pulls more demand out of the economy and will make it even harder for the economy to rebound.”

Consumer confidence in both Canada and the U.S. has been plummeting in the wake of the stock market meltdown, ongoing credit crisis and slumping economies.

If reckless spending and loose credit is bad for the individual then it is bad for the economy. Period. To lay blame on consumers for tightening their belt is nonsense.

A Bright-side of the Economic Downturn

The mighty bear might have some trouble flexing it’s muscles and scaring it’s neighbors in this chilly economic climate:

The bleak scenario would mark a rapid unraveling of Russia’s oil-fueled economic gains over the past eight years, during which time the government has paid down most of its foreign debt and built up a vast stockpile of international reserves.

[...]

Russia, which grew at over 8 percent last year, is facing a severe slowdown in growth, and possibly even recession next year, analysts say. Torrid figures released earlier this week showed that industrial output had plunged 10.8 percent in November from the previous month, signaling a dramatic slowdown in the final quarter.

AbitibiBowater Inc deserves nothing in “fair market” compensation

Sorry, AbitibiBowater! You lose!

The idea of a government enforced monopoly demanding “fair market” compensation after that monopoly is dismantled is laughable if not ignorant. Without the government granting the resource rights, it is anybody’s guess whether the business would even exist. So, there is no “fair market” at all.

Not that I would expect the Newfoundland government to do any better but for once, Danny Williams makes sense:

Revisiting his campaign theme of “no more giveaways,” Mr. Williams wished the company well, but said it will leave the province with the same resource rights it had on arrival: none.

Be this a lesson to all of the cronies who thrive on government privilege. What the government giveth, the government can taketh away.

Canadian banks are running out of credit-worthy borrowers

Why is the governor of the Bank of Canada, Mark Carney, telling the commercial banks that they should be lending out more money??? [I wonder why he should be talking at all? but that is a different story.] I would hope that the bankers know their customers better than the central bank does — they just have to. That is their business. They make profits by lending money to people.

The banks can lend more money but they can not create credit-worthy customers out of thin air. The banks can stimulate production in the short run by extending credit but the banks can not create productivity. There is a huge difference between short run production and long term productivity. It is the long term productivity that is the ultimate deciding factor for a lender because the lender needs the regular monthly payments.

Maybe one day, people will wake up to the fact that government enforced monopolies are the best way to misallocate resources. A monopoly on the issuance of currency is not free of economic law nor of naturally selfish human behavior.

Jörg Guido Hülsmann sums our hopeless predicament quite simply in his recent article Deflation and Liberty:

A paper-money system is not beneficial from an overall point of view. It does not create real resources on which our welfare depends. It merely distributes the existing resources in a different manner; some people gain, others lose. It is a system that makes banks and financial markets vulnerable, because it induces them to economize on the essential safety valves of business: cash and equity. Why hold any substantial cash balances if the central bank stands ready to lend you any amount that might be needed, at a moment’s notice? Why use your own money if you can finance your investments with cheap credit from the printing press?

Pre-Drinking: The “new” culture of intoxication

This hilarious story in the Toronto Star is reporting on the brand new practice of students drinking before going to bars.

Young people are engaging in a “new culture of intoxication” that even has its own buzzwords – “pre-drinking” or “pre-gaming.”

If the conclusions of this cutting edge research struck you as strange, you’re not alone. The story provoked an avalanche of comments from readers pointing out that pre-drinking is anything but new. My favourite comment:

“Wow great story. Let me get in my delorean but first lets pick up Michael J. Fox and Christopher Lloyd and we will all go back in time to when this article was written. 1952 Here i come.”

And just a few more:

“New Phenomenon? I am in my fifties and can remember doing it in my teens”

“Get with the times, boys. We called it pre-drinking when we did it 20 years ago.”

“Nothing new about that…I used to do that back in the 60′s”

“Um, I know people who did this in the 1970s and 80s. In the 1990s, when I was in uni, everyone did this.”

“Will they blame the economic crisis for this too? We used to call it “pre-loading”. As everyone before has said, this is not new”

“Sure, sure, it’s “new”. I realize I’m not saying anything different from what everyone else is saying, but the “pre-party” is not even remotely new.”

“Nothing new about this
There is absolutely nothing new about this.”

“The fact that ‘pre-drinking’ has been going on for at least 20 years and is just now being regarded by hack scientists as ‘dangerous’, probably means it isn’t. I guess they need something to scare us with so that grant money keep rolling in”

“I did this back in the college 10 years ago and my high school friends were doing it too before that”

“New phenomenon?
I’ve been doing this since I was 18!”

“This is new?
Huh. It seems I was ahead of the curve when i was doing this with my friends 13 years ago.”

“this is not something new… people have been pre-drinking since my first year of university in 1995″

“My friends and I and the vast majority of people in the small town I grew up in were “predrinking” 15yrs ago.”

“This was going on more than twenty-years ago when I was going out to bars and clubs. A few shooters or shots adn you are good to go.”

Harper Can Do Nothing Right, Can He?

The peanut gallery are proven right, again.

Back during and immediately after the election, when PM Harper was doing what Prime Ministers are supposed to do by making positive public statements about the economy, the opposition called him “delusional” and “blind” and “ignorant” for not seeing the massive crisis that was at hand and responding to it.

His defenders said that he was doing what he was supposed to do, and the opposition’s fearmongering was making Canada’s economic problems worse.

So PM Harper, deciding to acknowledge the public’s fears and attempting to take more of a realist-type stance, and acknowledges the gravity of the challenge of the world economy.

And what do the pundits do?  Of course.  Blast him for “not being positive”, and “increasing public fears”.

So, apparently, only liberals and new democrats have the skill and the timing to speak negatively to the public.  Conservatives only increase fear, or ignore reality if they dare to speak positively.

John McCallum needs to update his economics and speak to the modern generation

When people do not have money, Mr. McCallum, guess what? they have no money to spend. Comments like this:

“I think human behaviour drives recessions and recoveries, and confidence in the future drives human behaviour,” said Liberal MP John McCallum, a former chief economist for the Royal Bank of Canada.
“Especially during difficult times, leaders have to inject confidence and hope into their citizens and Stephen Harper has done precisely the opposite with these comments.”

are nonsense.
Does Mr. McCallum think that putting on a smiley face is a replacement for policy? or putting on a smiley face will magically create money? encourage consumers to spend money they do not have? lead consumers to stop using their senses in planning their own future? Coming from a Liberal, it would not surprise me.

His recent inconsistency notwithstanding, I think Mr. Harper is doing the right thing: telling the truth about what he sees now. Not to say that I think his policy prescriptions are appropriate but he is speaking to his audience correctly. [I hope he is just preparing the public for a less-than-expect fiscal stimulus.] I believe the younger generation is a completely different from the baby-boomers. The old Liberal superficial style may have earned accolades decades ago but nevermore.

Conservative Senate Appointments

You don’t have to apologize, Mr. Harper.  The Opposition has stalled for 3 years on senate reform.  If they won’t help you reform it into an elected body, you need make no excuse for doing exactly what the Liberals have done every time they are in power.  The system is made for it.

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