Unfortunately, there are people who are under the illusion that this can be stopped and insist on more bailouts. I believe that is misguided. Whether they like it or not, Europe will go into recession. It is not a question of if but of when the recession will occur.

In years to come, people will closely examine why the statesmen failed the proletariat. I have faith that future generations will be able to point to the printing of money as the source of malinvestment and recessions. There is no more boogeyman nor foreign invader. The source of the economic problem is found in government monopolization of money and the selective distribution of cheap money to the rich. Historians will have no choice but to link the century of warfare with the century of the failed central banking experiment.

The sooner the default, the sooner the economy can approach stability. Private investors will shy away from trusting government borrowing. Creditors will be more critical when they accept borrowers. Malinvestment will slow down and resources will be invested more astutely.

Back to the present.
The affluent Europeans will know what it is like to be economic refugees and they will feel for a long time in their own native land. Canadians should prepare themselves for massive immigration from Europe. We will be going back to our roots.

What I hate is the fact that free trade does not exist and everybody ignores injustice in the economy. Recent international events constantly demonstrate that we do not have international free trade. In China, local citizens are protesting the construction of a coal-fired plant where they live. The Chinese stooges who work for the government are beating them into submission.

There may be nothing that anybody can do to stop the evil Chinese government. However, we should not delude ourselves into thinking that the cheap junk we get from Chinese factories demonstrates the benefits of industrialization for them and the benefits of free trade for us.

The truth is that we benefit from both outright theft and our ignorance of the truth.

Peter Schiff: How to silence an economist: Ask him a question about the economy.

“Those who are protesting the rise of the corporate state are, in fact, on a political spectrum, the true conservatives because they are calling for the restoration of the rule of law.”

“This sounds like Fox News.”

At the end of the interview, the host thanks him for joining them and Hedges throws off his earphone with a final well-deserved jab: “It will be the last time.”

I rarely pay attention to the CBC but what a shame that their actors have alienated a very intelligent and responsible journalist.

CAVEAT: Personally, I do not care much one way or the other. I am not afraid of eating GMO foods. However, I have severe objections to the nature of their business model such that, if I had my druthers, the GMO market would not likely exit. In simple terms, I do not believe in patenting anything much less organisms but that is an argument for a different day.

Unlike the super-natural foods crowd, I doubt that the general public will care if this ballot initiative is adopted. People will pick up a package, read GMO on the label, compare prices and keep buying the same old junk. Initially, the mandatory labelling will have the opposite effect of a death blow. Rather than rejecting GMOs because of safety concerns, people will have less fear of GMOs after learning how much of them they have been eating all along!

Regardless of where you fall on the politics of this issue, I think it is only responsible to ask why it is that GMO labelling is not already happening voluntarily. If GMOs are a good thing, why not let it be known? I think the reason GMO labelling is not already pervasive is because the general public would be horrified to know that big business has such a stranglehold on the agricultural market. If there is going to be a death blow to the GMO industry, it will arise from the public revolting against so much control over nature and God’s bounty — not because people think GMOs are dangerous.

Until August, no Fed decision since 1992 had caused as many as three dissents on the policy committee. Economists say the level of disagreement isn’t surprising: It’s far from clear what more, if anything, the Fed should be doing to help lift the economy out of a low-growth, high-unemployment rut.

This dissent would not be news if it was not serious.

Maybe one day, all honest economics classes will teach that printing money does not create wealth.

When I first read about this twisted nonsense today, from every angle, it seemed too absurd even for the anti-welfare crowd. [CAVEAT: I do not believe in welfare mainly because I do not believe in taxation. That is a different story altogether. There is no point me using this opportunity to preach charity.] For an anti-welfare guy myself, I must say that I felt a little sick to my stomach learning that these poor people had to fork out the $30 themselves. I had just come back from grocery shopping and I had spent $60 for the coming week.

Not to get too weird on you all but people on welfare spending their welfare money on drugs does not bother me much at all. Starving them is not going to help. However, putting the boot to drug dealers will help. If the statesmen really honestly wanted to fight The War On Drugs, they could put a stop to it overnight. The police know all of the who, what, where, why and how. It does not stop because there is just too much money to be lost by stopping the drug trade.

A keel-hauling is in order and it has to start from the top. I predict that this stupid mandatory drug testing program will continue to yield 98% drug-free rates but as long as Gov. Scott is in office, the program will never stop. Here is why:

Scott’s sale of the company comes as he attempts to distance himself from repeated conflict-of-interest questions about whether the company he started in 2001 — and hoped to develop into a national chain — would benefit from the aggressive health care changes he wants state lawmakers to approve.

First, I was angry. Now, I am fuming. This is crony-capitalism at its worst. The free marketeers keep demanding less government intrusion in the market place and they are right, as far as I am concerned. The socialists point to this cronyism and say: “See! See! The free market is failing! We have to regulate the market!” but they fail to recognize that we do not live in a free market.

I want a free market. I want the backroom thievery of Rick Scott to stop. I want his pharma-friends to starve. They leach out more corporate welfare than all of the poor welfare recipients combined! The money saved by stopping all of the corporate welfare would make it so that poor people would not need hand outs.

I have to go out and cool off. Hat tip to Jane for bringing attention to this story.

When I pay somebody with legal tender that is any higher than a $20 bill, the first thing they usually do is take a closer look at it to see if it is fake. The hold it up to the Sun. They scan it with blue light. The rub it between their fingers. Somebody even smelled it once. I found out the other day that photocopied $5 bills are becoming very common in tip jars at establishments that usually have dim lighting. That is a pity. Anyway, That is our legal tender for you.

Counterfeit bills appearing in circulation is not the problem with fiat money. The real problem is the central bank increasing the money supply with nothing to back it.

If you pay me with a gold coin, I can test it to see if it is debased too. That may not be easy to do but it can be done. I can weigh it. I can measure its volume. Here is the beauty of using a precious metal: the government debasement of the money supply is on par with the debasement by a common crook. The government just can not hide its debasement the money supply.

Where Roubini is being disingenuous is by omitting the fact that people were forced to accept the King’s debased gold. Such extreme coercion can not happen today with debased metal.

The other good thing about precious metals is that it costs money to extract them. So, a person who wants to increase his wealth has a choice: dig or get a job and trade. It just makes no economic sense to fear an inflation of the gold supply.

One more thing about the monetization of precious metals is that nobody holds a monopoly upon what precious metals people will accept. Currencies will compete. Some people will trade gold. Other people will trade silver or whatever else.

Does that mean people will walk around carrying bags of gold in their pockets? No. They will keep using their plastic cards and trade private notes. However, at the end of the day or week or month, they will likely walk into their bank branch and demand to see their bars of gold in the vault to make sure there is no funny business going on. Heck, private vaults will probably spring up on the market to compete with banks!

But I don’t get stabbing your fiscal stability in the neck.

If you do a quick search of The Politic (the search box is down at the bottom of the right hand column), you’ll see that I have a beef with the idea of a harmonized sales tax. I don’t like the fact that it conceals the source of each part of the tax (though this could be alleviated by having retailers display the taxes separately while keeping all the other wonderful aspects of the HST), but c’mon man, that’s no reason to throw a tantrum when Gordon Campbell dupes you (and I know about tantrums, though my three-year-old is more reasonable when I tell she can’t have a chocolate cookie).

Consumption taxes are good. They’re less distortionary than so many other taxes. They reduce transaction costs. And if you build in the right mechanisms, they’re a hella lot more fair. And, oh yeah, the B.C. HST did that. The reach of the sales tax was, arguably, further reaching than your beloved PST, but the rebates (read: money in your pocket) that would be issued would out-weigh the inconvenience of having to pay more at the cash.

But I get it. The Liberals went about the wrong way, and you just hate it when politicians lie to you. Of course, you don’t seem to mind when Bill Vander Zalm lies to you (though, if that’s the worst thing he’s ever done…), but at least he lets you get some self-righteous populous rage on. Not like those darned elites pretending like they know better than you… oh, wait.

And that’s the point, right? Fiscal sensibility, balanced budgets, economic security, a simplified and fair tax code… that’s all meaningless compared to sticking it to the man. Bra-vo.

So, do you realize how much you’re in the hole for? Did you really think about what will have to be done to switch back to your archaic, sentimental PST? Do you realize you owe the rest of us 1.6 freakin’ Billion dollars? It was mentioned on Twitter that 1.6 million people voted in this act of grandstanding referendum, so that’s $1000 per vote that you owe us.

And to the BC NDP and its supporters, what on earth have you done? Sure, the federal NDP recently ran a fiscally irresponsible campaign, but, damn, if thye didn’t build up the NDP brand like no one else. I think they actually made people forget what ruinous policies the NDP actually stands for. But you wouldn’t let that spoil your fun. The Liberals needed to suffer and you needed to prove your economic illiteracy. Are you, in fact, blind to the reality that you need to expand your tax base to fund all the goodies you want to buy? Do you not realize that the HST was, on balance, a fairer and more efficient way to achieve that?

And to BC voters, do you feel good? Are reveling in the pain Gordon Campbell is, no doubt, feeling as parades around London? Do you think that everything will just be fine, because you’ve slain the bogeyman that is the overbearing elites? Do you actually understand what you’ve done? No matter how good it feels to rebuke the public servants who think so little of you, you have just dealt a major blow to the province that, I assume, you love so dear.

So, yeah, that big ol’ middle finger you thrust in the face of the ruling Liberal party, you just shoved it in your own eye.

Neither individuals nor nations can dig themselves out of debt by plunging further into it. And you don’t encourage workers to work harder by punishing their efforts with higher tax brackets.

Sounds good, right? The only problem is that Jim Flaherty and Mark Carney have been demanding an increase in credit and monetary expansion for the past few years. They are getting it too. The Conservatives are not following what Stockwell Day is suggesting.

I know. Conservatives will just say that they are following a balanced approach but that is nonsense. The Bank of Canada sustaining interest rates near zero is just a devious way to slowly redistribute wealth from the working class to the parasitic elite without anybody noticing.

As stock and bond markets across the world tumbled on fears about Italy and Spain, it emerged that police acting on orders from prosecutors had raided the Milan offices of rating agencies Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s as part of continuing investigations into their role in the recent financial turmoil.
—SNIP–
A separate inquiry is being conducted by prosecutors in Rome into market panics in June and July. Italy’s stock market regulator, Consob, last month summoned Moody’s and S&P for meetings and urged them not to release their statements during market hours.

Elio Lanutti, president of one of the consumer groups that sparked the inquiry, said: “The three ‘sisters’ – Standard & Poor’s, Moody’s and Fitch – are an erratic danger to state sovereignty in the areas of economics and finance”.

Anyway, I found this analysis by Noah Millman on the silliness of the downgrade and the potential silver linings quite interesting:

But there is at least a bit of a silver lining: S&P has downgraded American sovereign debt to below AAA for the first time in, to all intents and purposes, forever.

Since the manifest culpability of the ratings agencies in the financial crisis obviously hasn’t done enough to dent their credibility, perhaps this ludicrous decision will be the straw that finally breaks the camel’s back.

Why ludicrous? Because the United States has the strongest credit in the world, as evidenced by the extraordinarily low rates of interest demanded for our debt and by the fact that when there is a financial crisis – even one caused by purported fears of an American default! – investors flee to the safety of . . . American government debt.

Read the whole thing. His predictions may not come true, but I’d say the odds that they do are Double-Aubergine.

I am getting fed up (please accept the pun) of hearing about The Fed planning to print more money while the US Administration bumbles about pretending to try to solve the problem of common folks facing foreclosure.

Enough is enough! When are people going to come to their senses?? If there was one ounce of intelligence in the collective brains of the socialists they would figure out that the solution is simple: forgive these loans and stop printing money. Let the proletariat keep their damn houses for free. So what if a bunch of rich parasitic bankers lose their gravy train?

ADDENDUM:
(9 Aug 2011 21:09) Mok commented thusly elsewhere on the internet:

Forgiving someone’s loan to you is equivalent to handing them a fistful of cash. Both are interventions in the machination of the supposed free market. I don’t see a distinction.

To which I respond:
No.
The mortgages are packaged together by the banks and considered assets on their books. These assets allow the banks to lend out even more money.
Whereas, handing over a fistful of cash to the house owner qualifies for a home equity line of credit which pays a bit of interest but nowhere near as much interest the banks charge for lending out the same amount with the houses held as collateral.
On top of that, the banks over-appraise real estate in determining how much to lend. Short version: they are fabricating money and inflating the supply.
I will assume that it is common knowledge that inflating the money supply only leads to price inflation and the loss of savings.
So, the reality is that forgiving someone’s mortgage is equivalent to preventing multiple fistfuls of cash from being thrown into circulation.

The insurance companies should be free to insure anything they want but the funeral homes are being shafted. The banks/insurance companies have an unfair advantage because they print money. Economically, the funeral companies will be competing with the banks which are nothing more than tax-payer subsidized competitors. Soon, the insurance companies will be able to expand their base upon which their devious accounting tricks hide the inflation of the money supply.

Tony Clement, iPhone owner and federal Industry Minister, is unmoved by a renewed call for a federal fee on smart phones and handhelds to compensate artists for file-swapping.

…

He considers the recommendation – made most recently by an artists’ group this week – a dinosaur of an idea.

Mr. Clement says it’s up to artists to find a new way to make money in the age of Internet distribution.

For eight years, Canada has levied a charge on the purchase of compact discs that is supposed to compensate artists for the private copying of music. But fewer and fewer people use CDs to share music. The levy – currently 29 cents per compact disc – collects only $15-million a year now.

I’ve been a touch harsh on Tony Clement this past year, but I’m with him now.  I’m all for protecting intellectual property – up to a point – but a cash grab based on the assumption of guilt is a bridge too far.  It’s bad enough that they’re leaching off our CD purchases;they shouldn’t be allowed a windfall on the backs of iPhones and Androids.

A. Work, labour and toil for longer hours.
B. Go to law, business, or medical school.
C. Get a second job.
D. Speak two languages.

Answer: here.

Look, the argument is bunk.  How many people actually think that these “social engineers” will stop if they have no census data?  Do we really think that the politicians, activists and bureaucrats who are trying to run our lives will just give up their mission if they don’t have acurate statistics?  If North America’s social engineers were that concerned with data, every jurisdiction would have some form of school choice by now, and we’d be rid of the tyranny of teachers unions.

So sure, let’s ditch the long form census; it’s offensively intrusive, but let’s not fool ourselves into thinking that this will actually strike a blow againts interventionist goverment.

The union urges engineers to pay their fees — even though the federal government doesn’t require them to be registered — or they will be unable to work as engineers if they leave the public service.

now, would we?

Anyone who bothers to crack an economics text will know that globalization and free trade have lifted more human beings out of poverty than any other idea in history.

The reason is that trade creates wealth and jobs. Jobs allow people to feed their families and buy extras, produced by other people, which in turn employs those people. And on it goes.

I invite him to read my blog post: Everything we ignore about Free Trade which explains the falsehood of his economic faith. However, since he has demonstrated publicly his ignorance in economic principles, I will now summarize his ignorant mistake: He does not know whether the people in third world countries are freely choosing to participate in trade.

Michael Den Tandt should be blogging instead of wasting printed paper.

The scuttlebutt is that Mr. Bernier is angling to take a run at the Conservative leadership.   Recently, he has made some high profile speeches laying out potential economic policies.  He spoke about freezing public spending, and then eliminating corporate taxes.  So far, so good.

Then, writing in National Post on Tuesday, Maxime Bernier admitted that he has gold fever:

I believe that within a few years, we will need to hold a serious debate about returning to the gold standard.

His article is titled, ‘Inflation should be 0%’.  It’s a mish-mash of folksie (non-)wisdom and economic illiteracy.  He begins by arguing for 0% inflation, moves to supporting deflation, and backs it all up by noting that computers have dropped in price but people still by them.

Seriously:

In fact, there is nothing mysterious about the effects of lower prices. Think about computers. Fifteen years ago, they were big, not very powerful, had few gadgets, and cost a lot more than today. Prices in the computer business have been going down all the time since then.

Have people stopped buying computers or waited years before buying a new one to benefit from even lower prices? Absolutely not. On the contrary, more computers are being sold as their prices go down.

I really don’t know where to begin.  He makes no actual arguments in favour of deflation, he just makes a lot of assertions claiming that we’ll all be able to more stuff with the same amount of money.  There’s no indication as to how an expanding economy would function with a static money supply.  There’s also no reasoning to support the notion that gold has some eternal quality that makes it the perfect support for currency.

I just can’t imagine this person leading a major national party.  Under his lead, the future of the CPC would be less secure than classified documents left at an ex-girlfriend’s house.

I have some more thoughts on his antiquated stance here.

But Michael Ignatieff argues that Harper does not give enough credit to his Liberal predecessors, both Paul Martin and Jean Chrétien:

Meanwhile, when Stephen Harper goes around the world boasting about Canada’s economy – what he’s really boasting about is the Liberal record.

So, is Ignatieff right?

It appears so, according to The Economist:

Much of the country’s resilience stems from policies—such as bank regulation and sound public finances—which predate Mr Harper.

The results from Finance Minister Graham Steele’s cross-province consultation on the province’s finances are in, and they indicate a sales tax increase is coming in next week’s budget.

Related: Government fiscal myopia (Tax! Tax! Tax!) cuts across party lines, it seems. The Quebec Liberals.

Update April 1: Éric Duhaime expounds on the tax and spend addiction of the Quebec Liberals. Increasing government spending by 3% “year after year after year.” Nice.

… the Fraser Institute, which champions free-market economic solutions, concluded government spending and infrastructure investment accounted for just 0.2 percentage points of the 1.1 per cent growth between the second and third quarters of 2009. [...]

“First of all, that’s completely wrong and quite frankly contradicted by very serious work that’s been done [elsewhere]” Harper told reporters. “Economic theory and history is clear, governments must … make sure [funds] are put to productive use in the economy to create jobs.”

And with that, Mr. Harper demonstrates he is a pro-Keynesian quasi-capitalist who really does not believe economic freedom alone can pull nations out of challenging economic times. Actions and now words have shown that when the pressure is on the CPC believes government must intervene by essentially reversing the generational taxpayer truck to the government trough and opening the valve.

The gig is up. A free market, small-government, fiscal conservative Mr. Harper is not.

Canadian Heritage has 45 days to complete the review launched Jan. 27, but it could be extended by another 30 days if needed.

Walid Hejazi, a professor of international business at the University of Toronto, said he believes the government is close to allowing Amazon in to Canada, a move that would be consistent with the government’s recent steps to open Canada to more foreign investment.

And doing so would provide better prices and more jobs to Canadians.

Paul Misener, Amazon’s vice-president of global public policy who has been meeting with government officials, says a Canadian distribution centre would provide a benefit to the country.

“We are pleased to be continuing to communicate with policy-makers about the benefits that we have brought to Canadian culture both within Canada and globally,” he said Wednesday.

With the Canadian government opening up the telecom and satellite industry to foreign ownership allowances, Amazon could potentially be leading the way (hopefully) for foreign corporations coming into Canada and being able to take advantage of the benefits of doing business in Canada.

But, in many ways, Canada has been a closed market to so many different competitors because of those very foreign ownership laws and how they slam up against our cultural preservation limitations.

However, if it happens, and more follow, those industry “giants” as some call them, will only add to jobs in Canada which leads to a larger tax base, both corporately and in individual spending.

And Jack Layton wants to prevent tax benefits for “big business”. Michael Ignatieff doesn’t think the current Budget will create new jobs for Canadians.

“We will vote against it, but in a way that does not provoke an election,” Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff told reporters, speaking in French. “I don’t see a path in this budget that gets Canadians back to work. This is the key thing.”

Mr. Layton and Mr. Ignatieff, this is how this Budget could, and I stress could get Canadians back to work and raise our GDP to levels that can accomplish what the Budget proposes.

Instead of poo-pooing the Budget just because you hate the Conservatives, try finding ways to make it work, or make it work better.

Support the Government and encourage these initiatives that are bringing investors and jobs to Canada!

My first thought? Duh!

This was followed shortly by the thought that the massive vacuum in the employment sector should, in theory, mean the end of unemployment. Right? Yeah, I’m not so sure about it either. However, it will be an interesting test on those who claim they can’t find work. I believe that it will come down to one of two things. 1) Those who aren’t working don’t actually want to work, and 2) Those who aren’t employed don’t have any desirable skills needed to maintain employment.

An inflammatory statement? Perhaps. But perhaps the truth hurts sometimes.

Still, I’m tired of hearing how dismal the future will be with the advent of the Baby Boomer Retirement Saga. Presumably, companies will have the same amount of demand (if not more) for their services or products. The problem they will be facing is that they may not have enough people to provide it.

This leads to the question of what to do about it. One alternative is that the entire job market is going to have to change in shape. Companies are going to be demanding more of their employees, and so they’re going to have to be willing to pay salaries at a rate comparable to the demand placed on the employee. Also, in an employee’s market, they have the power. Companies will have to offer sufficient incentive to hold onto employees who may be being tempted by other companies looking to fill their own vacancies. This may also open the door to employer-provided day care to encourage mothers (fathers too) to return to the workforce. Day Care business boom is in there too, or Nannies for that matter.

Now, I’m not suggesting that this will fill the gap. We’ve known for decades that the current Pension system is broken and that there was a coming storm. Still, higher wages and salaries mean more taxes being collected from jobs that before had paid less, and the potential for savings in the EI system also mean savings Federally.

Just some things to consider.

The Cowardly Lion (played by Mr. Michael Ignatieff) – ‘This budget is so very terrible that we simply can’t stand to support this government! In fact, we are so unhappy with it, we’ll rrrruff, and we’ll rrrrrufff! and we will vote against it with at least fully half of our caucus!’

Yep. So instead of getting fully behind his rhetoric and getting his entire caucus to vote against the budget, he opts for the cowardly route. Not that I’m looking for an election or anything, since that would just be stupid on anyone’s part. But still, it makes you wonder if Mr. Ignatieff has spine enough to bring consensus to his caucus and have everyone of them move in lockstep. Judging by his previous courageous stands, well, I’m not going to hold my breath…

The Scarecrow (played by Mr. Jack Layton) – ‘Well look, see, there’s a lot of things I like in this budget that addresses some of our larger concerns, but we don’t want to think about that. Look at the things he’s doing that I don’t like!’

Right! The ‘If I only had a brain!’ argument! Jack Layton couldn’t decide what he was going to do about the Budget. Was he going to support it? Was he going to vote against it? Was he going to try and negotiate? Was he going to do anything? Mr. Layton just couldn’t decide! So instead, he’s going to take it to his caucus and tap into the power of loony-left-groupthink and come up with something outrageous.

The Tin Man (played by Mr. Gilles Duceppe) - ‘You see, I don’t care about the rest of Canada. I only heart Quebec. This budget does not do the things for the Quebec Nation that we want, so since we don’t get special treatment above and beyond the rest, we vote no.’

Thanks Gilles! I think we knew that the man with no heart for Canada wouldn’t support a budget that doesn’t try to bribe Quebec with the rest of the nation’s money.  How very predictable, but then we expect that from Mr. Duceppe…wait, was that a redundant observation? We expect predictability…? Anyway, back to navel-gazing for you Mr. Duceppe.

So in the end, while we got the usual reactions from the usual suspects, I was at least momentarily amused by them. Carry on carrying on boys!

Mr. Krugman states that Canada’s advantage has been in being stricter about limiting bank leverage, and that’s true. But he then blames Reagan-era deregulation for the “dangerously interesting” US banking system and suggests that the wild American banking mustangs must thus be broken to the regulatory bit.

The thing is, in his Keynesian enthusiasm, he is neglecting the most important qualities of the Canadian financial system, the things that really made the difference and account for the fact that we didn’t have a US-style housing collapse and have to bail out our entire banking system. The stuff he cites in his column is all correct, as far as it goes, but it’s just the feathers, not the chicken.

The first major difference between the US and Canada that Mr. Krugman neglects is that we do not have the perverse government-spawned incentive of mortgage interest deductibility.

[...]

The second big difference in Canada that Mr. Krugman neglects to consider is that our mortgage law is far more lender-friendly than that in the US, where it is far more borrower- friendly. We don’t have no-recourse loans where you can just mail in the keys on your underwater mortgage and walk away. And, more importantly, our lenders can much more easily act on their collateral.

It’s been a year since the over hyped and under performing ‘stimulus’ package was passed in the U.S., and even with the employment rate still hovering around 10% (it dropped 0.3% to 9.7% in January), Mr. Obama has the gall to trumpet the success of the stimulus package in saving or creating 2 million jobs.

The stimulus package was a mistake.  The very premise of the stimulus package has been proven faulty; the notion that this money needed to be pumped into the economy right away is refuted by the fact that the United States government expects most of the stimulus money to be spent in 2010.

Even their job claims are ridiculous.  Sure, it’s conceivable that 2 million more people would be out of work had it not been for the stimulus, but considering the length and depth of the increased unemployment in the United States over the last 12 months, it’s pretty hard to believe (especially if you accept the idea that the real unemployment rate in the United States is 17%).  Further, the notion of jobs being created was always absurd, and often interpreted creatively.  The administration appears to understand this, and have continued to walk back from their original claims of the job-creating power of the stimulus.  However, on the anniversary of this grand mistake, they are throwing reason to the wind, standing tall on the shoulders of this fiscal albatross.

Even if Barack Obama says it, it does not make it true.

“The Canadian Real Estate Association, through its members, has substantial control or complete control over the supply of residential real estate brokerage services throughout Canada,” the Bureau said in its filing to the Competition Tribunal. “CREA and its members have used CREA’s control of MLS and related trademarks to impose exclusionary restrictions on their use.”

Well, duh. The Canadian Real Estate Association should be free to operate their website listings however they choose. It makes sense to restrict the listings to their own members. You have to pay to play.

What is next? Will the Competition Bureau go after the Water Buffalo Club for excluding non-members from participating in their weekly karaoke night?

The MLS.ca listing service is a fraction of what the Canadian Real Estate Association offers to its members and to the public. Membership also incorporates a recognition of certain standards of business practice. Up until this point, a real estate customer who finds a listing on the MLS.ca has certain expectations and possibly recourse if those expectations are not met. Any clarity of such standardization will soon be crushed by the Competition Bureau.

This is a fine example of the innate challenge with civil service and socialism. Since the job of a civil servant is rarely — if ever at all — threatened by market forces, the civil servant can be forever fixated on optimizing the most pleasant color of the website without ever realizing that the performance of the back-end matters substantially more.

Membership in CREA is somewhere in between the aesthetics of the MLS.ca site and the performance of its search engine.
Should a day’s labor or a week’s labor or maybe a month be spent choosing the best color of the website?
Should a month’s labor or a week’s labor or only one day be spent optimizing the search engine?
Without the risk of loss, the civil servant can not make such responsible decisions. Balancing all of the features of the business model should be decided by the business owner. If the balance is a failure, it is the business owner who pays not the civil servant.

To the civil servant, devoting exorbitant resources to study and develop esoteric details is fun — sometimes the very goal — but can ultimately be a waste to the customer. In this way, the damage created by the civil servant can continue unchecked at the expense of the intended beneficiaries.

The competition bureau fabricates their own “work” and when they run out of things to do, they have the state-blessed power to invent more. In so doing, they trample the freedoms of innovators and economic progressives. After the competition bureau crushes the MLS.ca listings, there will be less of an incentive for real estate agents to aspire to the high standards of the Canadian Real Estate Association and the customer will ultimately have a more difficult time separating the wheat from the chaff.

Regardless, let us not get bogged down in economic incentives and intelligent market analysis. As far as I am concerned, the Canadian Real Estate is a business and I presume they need to make money to survive. The restrictive policy of the MLS.ca is an honest way to make their money.

The highest-paid federal employees are doing best of all on salary increases. Defense Department civilian employees earning $150,000 or more increased from 1,868 in December 2007 to 10,100 in June 2009, the most recent figure available.

When the recession started, the Transportation Department had only one person earning a salary of $170,000 or more. Eighteen months later, 1,690 employees had salaries above $170,000.

The trend to six-figure salaries is occurring throughout the federal government, in agencies big and small, high-tech and low-tech. The primary cause: substantial pay raises and new salary rules.

What are the odds the same result isn’t occurring in Canada?

“For some Canadian businesses, the recovery may prove as challenging as the downturn,” he said.

Is recession a dirty word?

Complete the sentence:

“While the bank does not entirely understand why productivity growth has been as slow as it has been, we do understand the consequences,” Mr. Carney said, repeating a warning last month that economic growth could be limited to no more than 2% for much of this decade. This will be due to slower productivity growth and an ageing population.

… and ultimately due to the printing of money.

Printing money creates a false economic indicator. As a result, it aggravates business cycles. That is what we are witnessing right now. Thank you, all you money printers and credit expansionists!

Now, I live in a rural riding, and I’ve seen the challenges people have in finding day care for their children. Now I’m sure it’s ridings exactly like mine that Mr. Ignatieff et al have their eyes on when they talk about this glorious idea of a Nationalized Daycare program. Here’s the problem though, as seen through the eyes of someone in a rural riding.

We are not Toronto. Not a big surprise and certainly no stretch of the imagination. We have a population of approximately 109,000 people according to Elections Canada. If you’ve followed that link and looked into this riding, the map shows that we’re a fairly long strip of rural land. About half the population lives in Chatham itself and the remainder is spread out into smaller communities.

Now where the population is widely spaced, it’s likely that the only National Daycare Centres that would be put in place here are in the communities of Chatham and Leamington, possibly Tilbury and possibly Ridgetown. That leaves everyone else within the riding having to drive their children 20-30 minutes away from home and then having to travel back in order to go to work. This will very likely cause a lot of grief on any parent who would have to drive an hour (round trip) to another city/town at the beginning and the end of their day just to put their child into this Nationalized Daycare program.

As I’m sure everyone knows, there will be an complaint about Undue Hardship. The typical Liberal response to that will be to offer a subsidy for local day care because of the “unreasonable” distance a parent needs to travel. Likely, the local day care will be charging more given the potential loss of children to the ND program and the fact that it’s government subsidized. This will of course drive up the costs of the program. And I think we also know that the bleeding heart Liberals will succumb to nearly every complaint and woe presented to them.

Then there’s the loss of jobs in the private sector. For a party screaming about the loss of jobs in Canada, to put in a program that will essential wipe out an entire private industry is appalling! The government will of course require certain specialized certification in order to justify the elimination of the private industry which will require current providers to either upgrade their knowledge, which means going back to school which means loss of income and an increase in student debt ($$$), which may further be subsidized by the government ($$$), or else the former daycare provider will just have to suck it up and find a new job (more likely) or go on Employment Insurance ($$$), provided they’re eligible…

All of these costs will end up spiraling out of control (see National Gun Registry) due to poor planning and unrealistic expectations in productivity. The usual answer of the Liberals is to simply throw money at it and hope that solves the problem while crowing about investing in childcare (see Health Care).

How will they pay for all of this? Easy. They’ll simply raise taxes, or pull a Dalton on us and create a Childcare Premium.

The Liberals have been talking about this for nearly 2 decades and still can’t provide anything close to some kind of detail as to how this program might function within budget. This tells me that they have no plan, and that they’re just going to ‘figure it out as we go’.

If this ever happens, I’ll weep for the nation.

Sarkozy called for new accounting rules and tighter limits on executive pay, adding that the risks are too great if “we do not change the regulation of our banking system and the rules for accounting and prudential oversight.”

Great! The solution to our economic woes is more accounting trickery! Wonderful!
All we have to do is reshuffle figures from one column to the other. Furthermore, this comes with the admission that governments and regulators — the very people who are telling us they have the solution now — have been endorsing the wrong accounting tricks which are at fault for the collapse of the money markets.

Blaming the free market is a canard — a most dishonest and stupid canard because there never was a free market in money.

I really wonder what the hell is going on in the mind of Stephen Harper. For the first time in history, Canadians have a Prime Minister whose background in economics arguably — specifically promoting free-markets — stands out from all others. Confused conservatives who yearn for their own peculiar brand of small government actually have an intelligent reason to suspect that their man may deliver. Sadly, any consistency in economic theory is falling apart before our very eyes. Most people have been fed so much KeynesianoMonetarist nonsense that they can not see it. The central command in the market for money is collapsing just like central command in any other market tends to collapse.

For a Prime Minister who has worked hard in the past to promote free markets, it must be bizarre to have to utter the following pap:

To be succinct, the real test of the G-20 going forward, is that it develops and sustains among its members a sense of shared responsibility towards the global economy.

For while the market’s awesome power to generate and widely distribute wealth is self-evident, we also know markets need governance. For the new global economy, the G-20 is what we have.

Spoken like a true command economy central planner! Way to go, Harper! Karl Marx would be proud!

I am dismayed, but not the least bit surprised at the recent announcement by Mark Carney, the governor of the Bank of Canada:

“It is the responsibility of households now to ensure that in the future, when the recovery takes hold and extraordinary measures are unwound, they can still service their debts,” Carney said during a speech to the National Forum of business leaders in Toronto.

Last year, I warned everybody about the nonsense promoted by our federal Minister of Finance, Jim Flaherty:

• Why is Flaherty promoting credit as an economic solution?
• No Canadian bank bailouts but “make credit available” instead?

I was right and only now our leaders are telling us bluntly that we will pay.

This monetary policy was a horrifying bait and switch. Last year, we were told that Canadians needed credit. That was a lie to cover the fact that the monetary expansion was benefiting a select few. Now, we are told that too much household credit will be a problem.

Let’s assume (for the sake of argument) that a burgeoning global population is actually a problem. First of all, that’s got nothing to do with Western democracies. Our birth rates are already below replacement and continue to fall decade by decade. (For a more convincing explanation for why this is so than I can muster, please watch Lord Monckton’s presentation in Minneapolis. It’s long but it’s worth every minute of your time.) As it stands, we need higher levels of immigration just to maintain the assorted taxation pyramid schemes that pay for our current standard of living. Artificially reducing our already low birthrates only exacerbates this issue.

More importantly then, what Diane is proposing is encouraging Third World countries to adopt and enforce rigid population control policies. Countries like, let’s say, Sudan. We’ve seen how Sudan handles inconvenient populations. Throw forced abortions and sterilizations into the mix and what she’s proposing (intentionally or not) are dozens of little holocausts worldwide as dominant demographics seek to meet globally mandated targets by shifting the pressure to shrink onto their minority populations.

This is lunacy that would be unbecoming of some leftist hack in the back pages of the Star. Imagine my surprise seeing this spreading across the US blogs this morning only to discover that it’s the brainchild of a respected economics reporter at one of Canada’s more reasonable financial papers.

Michel Jarraud at Copenhagen

Confused? Unimpressed? Gobsmacked?  Well, follow the money.  Lorne Gunter:

The proof that the current climate summit in Copenhagen is not about environment and science, but rather about politics and ideology, can be seen in that fact that two weeks ago, some young computer programmer’s conscience got the better of him and he released computer code and emails exposing the skeleton of climate change. Yet almost no one in Copenhagen is talking about it.

It doesn’t matter that almost no one outside the climate change industry had heard of the Climate Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia before the release. The CRU’s centrality to the mystery of Eco faith is undeniable. The CRU and GISS — NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies— are two of the four major repositories of temperature records in the world, the only two that show continuing warming and the two that the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change relies on for its forecasts of disaster.

Scientists from GISS are also implicated in the torquing of climate data revealed in the recent CRU leaks. This is not surprising given that the head of GISS, James Hansen, is Al Gore’s science guru. He testified on behalf of environmental terrorists who attacked a U.K. electrical station, saying they should not be convicted because their vandalism was in the public interest. He has called coal trains “death trains.”

Nevertheless, delegates in the Danish capital have practically glossed over the CRU “Climategate” leaks. That’s partly because they refuse to let the facts get in the way of their cause, but it’s mostly because Copenhagen isn’t about climate change as a physical phenomenon, but rather climate change as an opportunity to regulate people’s lives and incomes on a global scale (emphasis added).

Regulation == more government == more taxation == more socialism == less freedom.

Update 1 PM EST: A tidy point overlooked by some in George Monbiot’s anti-Canada screed, “A concerted campaign has now begun to expel Canada from the Commonwealth.” This, based directly upon the pseudo-science behind said manufactured “hockey stick” and the foregone conclusions that a) carbon dioxide is absolutely to blame for the highly arguable increase in global temperatures and b) the contestable warming is unprecedented in history c) because of the industrial revolution.

I am inclined to laugh at the absurdity of the effort except for its serious angle, which is an indication of the horribly misguided zeal and incredible moral inversion amongst the AGW faithful, such as Mr. Monbiot. Consider for a moment that Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe was merely suspended from the Commonwealth in 2002 despite its well-documented sham elections, rampant corruption, organized coercion, political assassinations, oppression of political dissent and overall economic oppression of its own people.  Canada is a model country to the world in politics and economics with an excellent justice system and a Charter and Constitution that is the envy of many, yet we have a relatively immense oil field in Northern Alberta, the development of which is causing some pollution. This makes us greater sinners than the Mugabe regime.

Ye gods.

Vox Day rightly argues that this is historically, scientifically, economically and politically insane.

It is historically insane because we know the planet was more than two degrees warmer as recently as 500 years ago. It is scientifically insane because we know beyond any shadow of a doubt that the world is not warming according to any of the predictions based on models which are based on the idea that higher carbon dioxide levels produce higher temperatures. It is economically insane because it strengthens the contractionary forces that are already in the process of plunging the world into the greatest depression of the modern era. It is politically insane because it reverses more than 300 years of advancing human liberty and democracy.

Adding to the insanity is the specter of “approved” middlemen, a global governance structure, managing the transfer of wealth and enforcing environmental targets.  The rank hypocrisy on display at Copenhagen leads one to believe the scams resulting from global emissions management, some of which have already started to unfold in Europe, would make the UN Oil-for-Food scandal look like petty theft.

The first impression one receives of the summit is the sheer hypocrisy of it. Here are green campaigners who damn the rest of us for the size of our “carbon footprints” and challenge us each to reduce our carbon output by one tonne per year. Yet they themselves are flying in using a squadron of private jets, hiring a fleet of limousines and gorging themselves on expensive food flown in from around the world.

In all of Denmark, there are only a few of dozen limousines for hire. So more than 1,000 of the gas-guzzling, carbon-belching behemoths have been driven to Copenhagen from Sweden, Germany, the Netherlands and France. Since, at most, 140 heads of state and heads of government will attend the week-long conference, the bulk of these land yachts are being delivered for use by United Nations officials, the heads of environmental organizations and celebrities. All these people preach environmental sustainability for others, yet do not practice it themselves.

Digressing a bit, I suspect the governing “Conservatives” are thinking long and hard about their play at Copenhagen given their stronghold in Western Canada, oil country.  I’ve no doubt they’ve been inundated with queries and demands from the grassroots in light of the CRU leak, and I suspect they will take a beating on the hustings and in the pocketbook should they capitulate to the anti-freedom forces in Copenhagen and/or align Canada in any way with a carbon trading scheme.  If the CPC has any hope of forming a majority government, they’d best steer clear of these local landmines.

Back to Copenhagen, which, of course, is merely step one in the twisted world of enviro-fascism.  Oh, you didn’t hear?  Yes, the AGW prophet, Al Gore, served notice that the bar has already been raised.

Even if a deal is reached at the UN climate change talks in Copenhagen next week it will only be the first step towards the far more radical cuts that are needed in global carbon emissions, Al Gore, the former US Vice-President, told The Times last night….

He insisted that the present goal set for Copenhagen of stabilising world emissions of carbon dioxide at or below 450 parts per million — enough to prevent a rise in average global temperatures of no more than 2C — was insufficient and a safer target would be 350 parts per million.

“Insufficient.”  A fitting conclusion to an obligatory post about Copenhagen, for it reminds us that no matter what we do it will never be enough for the enviro-fascist leftards seeking to destroy Capitalism and Western freedom.  It reminds us that environmental policy has a fascist chassis and a socialist economic engine.  It reminds us that Copenhagen and all such global management endeavours are fundamentally about the transfer of power from the individual to the State.  It reminds us that freedom is being bartered under the guise of “being green.”  It reminds us to punish the CPC if they buckle.

Update 8 PM EST: Ice core context.  An absolute must see.  (Hat tip SDA.)  As has been mentioned previously, the issue is not whether we are currently in a warming period. It’s whether it is unprecedented and whether the cause is assuredly carbon dioxide and man-made emissions.