I haven’t posted anything here for a long time. Life gets busy, and there seems to be many other ways to make a positive difference in people’s lives…..and that is what I really like to do.
I am concerned about a trend I see in Canada. Maybe it is elsewhere, but I have not been traveling during the Plague, so I cannot offer firsthand testimony. What I see here is the widening difference between being Have-Nots and what that very astute MP Pierre Poilievre refers to as Have-Yachts. 25 years ago it seemed to me that there was a veritable slave class developing, and that maybe the best way out of it for most people was education. I have long encouraged people, both young and old, to get more education. Aside from the process being good for maintenance and development of mental faculties, knowledge is power.
I see Canada’s GDP per person rapidly declining. We are now #18 according to a list I recently saw (https://statisticstimes.com/economy/countries-by-projected-gdp-capita.php). $42k GDP per person. And when you consider that GDP is about production, and not usability of the production, that makes matters worse. For example, if production is wasted or destroyed, it is still part of GDP. GDP can be very high in a war economy even though huge amounts of resources are being blown up and do not increase wealth at all.
Our per capita income is reported as higher than the 42k. No wonder, with all the cash being freely given to people, ostensibly as “stimulus.” It’s sad that our financial policy makers are so economically illiterate that they think cash injected into an economy whose debt is several multiples of GDP will actually stimulate the production of goods and services. So far as I know, there is no empirical evidence to support such nonsense. Instead, what we have is an increasing amount of cash chasing a decreasing amount of goods and services. The economy is choking, and our governments are stuffing more cash down its throat.
I am not against distributing cash, but it must be accompanied by measures to increase the production of goods and services if our standard of living is to be maintained. We do not eat cash, cover ourselves with it, nor drive it. If 100 people show up at an auction with $10,000 each, prices to which the items are bid will be a lot lower than if someone suddenly gives each attendee another $5,000. Our economy is like the auction. We are driving prices up at quite the rate. Far beyond the annual 2% rate that the Bank of Canada claims as a target. We left 2% over the rear horizon quite a while back. Yet the Bank of Canada keeps on with the story that sounds like it was written by a Liberal speech writer. It looks to me like we have entered into an inflationary depression. Admittedly, there are deflationary pressures such as low consumer demand and the possibility of a credit collapse, but I think the Bank of Canada, with its fake excuses, will keep pumping cash into the federal buckets.
In the short-term, the deficit between growth of money and decline of production has been closed by imports, but that is not a sustainable solution. The value of our money is only what our creditors assign to it, and the more money have versus our own production, the lower the value of the money because essentially a nation’s money is a claim on its production. Ultimately, the lower our production, the lower our standard of living.
Come to think of it, in some ways the standard of living has been dropping since I was a boy. We used to have physicians making house calls and milk delivered to the door (from a horse drawn wagon even!). We used to sit in the car while the gas was pumped for us and the windshield washed and the oil checked. We used to be able to phone businesses and not reach a computer giving us a string of layered messages, adverts and monotonous music. We used to be able to drop in at a CRA (at various times CCRA and Revenue Canada) office and talk to a real person face to face. We had wood furniture. We had stay at home moms because families could live on one income. We didn’t have our public parks (such as Beacon Hill here in Victoria) turned into squatter camps. We had grade schools with classes of under 20 students.
No, this country is in a slide, mostly under the stupefied watch of its “natural ruling party” --- the Liberal Party, which long ago divorced itself from liberal values so far as I can tell.
