i'm tired of reading about the awful but necessary things being done by israel in gaza, but the truth remains what it is, they won't release the hostages.

can the arab world get the idiots to release the fucking hostages, before there's nobody left to kill? or is that what they actually want?

i want to deconstruct the logic on this scurvy-generating policy of slapping import taxes on american orange juice (how many indigenous kids are you going to send to the hospital over this?), and then rationalizing it by saying you can buy orange juice from mexico or brazil instead. this naive application of market theory is going to argue that orange juice imported from mexico or brazil will remain lower in cost because it's not being taxed, while orange juice from the united states will price itself out of the market. this will harm american producers, who will no longer be able to compete in the canadian market.

is that what's going to happen?

well, that's not what i learned in school about markets or how markets work.

rather, what i learned about markets in school is that the orange juice industry is an oligopoly (bananas are a monopoly. have you ever seen the price of bananas vary from store to store by more than a cent? the banana industry is so controlled, it's like an organized crime syndicate. the upside is that inflation is low. the only commodity that's experienced less inflation than bananas is marijuana. shrinkflation aside, it's still $10/gram, right?) and that orange juice producers inside the oligopoly will consequently cooperate to set prices in a way that is consistent. what that means is that a modern, evidence-based, non-naive, non-ideological analysis of how the orange juice industry actually works in the real world (really existing market theory) would rather predict that if you put an import tax on american orange juice then manufacturers of orange juice from brazil or mexico would react by cooperating with american producers and increase their prices proportionally to maintain price consistency. mexican orange juice producers would not seek to compete with american orange juice producers, as that would not be in their self-interest, which is to maintain high prices to maximize profits for investors. in an oligopoly, competition is destructive and harmful and to be avoided at all costs, as a primary corporate objective.

oligopolies can be upset by the introduction of new manufacturers seeking to enter the market by undercutting the oligopoly, but it's hard to see where that's going to happen, unless we start growing oranges in greenhouses in southern ontario and the okanagan valley, which is not the worst idea i've ever heard. that may force the oligopoly to compete, until the new manufacturer can enter the oligopoly, or be targeted by it for destruction, dismantling or hostile takeover.

the result is that this attempt to minimize inflation by choosing commodities with replacements is naive and a poor understanding of how markets actually function in the real world. the import taxes, as regressive consumption taxes, will simply be inflationary across the board in the commodities being targeted. they will not harm american producers, they will just lead to inflation in the targeted commodities. further, this deconstruction of the orange juice oligopoly would apply to most other commodities being imported and most other industries, which are oligopolies or cartels in the real world, and which don't want to compete with each other, but want to avoid competing with each other. that's why we have huge government departments trying to force companies to compete with each other to salvage the facade of the make believe ideology of market economics - they don't want to compete, they realize competing is dumb. markets that have competition are called unstable; that's a definition. an unstable market is defined as a market that has competitive firms. all unstable markets tend to oligopolies as stable outcomes, which you can derive using differential equations, by using game theory (the nash equilibrium) or by just taking as an analogy to blackbody radiation or any other steady-state equation. markets tend towards equilibrium between producers and consumers; they don't tend towards competition, but towards the abolition of competition. then, the government has to step in and kick them in the ass and yell at them "start fucking competing.".

if we had real anarchy in the colloquial sense, the real end of government, the first thing that would happen is that this naive government creation we call the market economy would completely evaporate, and be replaced by feudal cartels and landowners colluding with each other to reduce everyone around them to slavery, leaving the workers and slaves and serfs and migrants to organize to try to survive. from that origin point, the workers could start building the kinds of societies that anarchists in the technical sense have long imagined and desired, by starting from the bottom up in collectives and communes, intended to size control from the oligopolies and feudal lords and cartels. markets cannot exist without governments to define, oversee and ultimately regulate them, as nobody would agree to these contrived and often childish rules that are in nobody's self-interest without an organized system of violence and control threatening them to behave via a monopoly on violence. no government means no markets.

that's what i learned in school, anyways.

if what carney ends up doing is reducing or cancelling the relatively progressive (in the sense that the wealthy pay more) consumer carbon tax and replacing it with a regressive consumption tax on imports by wrapping himself in the flag to sell it (and from this point on, i will refrain from using the word "tariff" or the terminology of "retaliatory tariff". i will instead strictly use the terminology of "import tax" or "regressive consumption tax"), that will work out to a massive shift in the tax burden from the wealthy to the poor, which is exactly the kind of policy that bankers love and have been pushing for the last sixty years. since 1970, we've seen an astronomical downloading in the tax burden, and continuing that shift seems to be the entire point of carney's fiscal strategy. he's also calling for a cancelling of the carbon tax rebate and to replace it with income tax cuts on the "middle class", which in liberal party terminology is just code for the rich. it's a massive shift upwards in wealth, consistent with and an extension of everything else that has defined the neo-liberal era, fiscally. i've been nailing trudeau for ten years for being too right-wing on economics, but he seems like a socialist in comparison to carney.

worse, he wants to balance the budget. this is not the time to concern yourself with the irrelevance of balanced budgets. nobody cares about balanced budgets, and to the extent that it concerns your average voter, most people just hear "cuts in services" when politicians talk about balancing budgets. canada is not in the poor fiscal position it was in in the 90s, and we have no motives to incur the kind of difficult cuts in government spending that we had to endure through the 90s to chase off the vampires at the imf, which mark carney is basically one of. the issues we have in front of us are poor healthcare delivery, mass poverty, a housing crisis, drug addiction, environmental degradation, climate change....we should be talking about dramatically increasing government spending as a percentage of gdp to deal with these massive problems we have in front of us that are in a large sense a consequence of previous attempts at budget balancing, not talking about balancing the budget. the imf isn't on our ass right now at all. in that sense, carney is very much the wrong person at the wrong time. shifts in the tax burden from the rich to the poor and cuts in services to balance the budget is not what canada needs at this time, but what canadians should be rallying around each other and strenuously fighting to avoid. that prescription will severely harm us, make us weaker and make us easier to invade.

i'm not going to support these shifts in fiscal and tax policy.

rather, i'm going to aggressively campaign against them and do everything i can to explain them to low income people so that they understand what the proposals are and don't vote against their own interests.

the simple analysis is that mark carney is a banker and his fiscal and tax policies reflect that fact. they're exactly what you'd expect from a banker. do you want to vote for a banker? does that sound like a smart choice to you?

"counterpunch"?

we're punching ourselves.

ugh.

this is what they want. we walked right into it.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/world/trumps-tariffs/article/canada-hits-back-at-trumps-latest-tariffs-with-298b-countermeasures-live-updates-here/

who should pay for the tariffs?

america should pay for the tariffs!

bizarrely, increasing consumption taxes might be popular in canada, right now.

but it's not a good policy and not an effective response, and it will just hurt low income canadians, while inflicting minimal harm on american capital. the real winner is the federal government, which gets a new revenue stream.

if they really wanted to fight back, they'd bring in export taxes, not so-called retaliatory tariffs.

that said, there's a relatively easy way to fix the regressive part of the tariff tax hike, and it's to send out tariff rebate checks, like they send out gst rebate checks.

it doesn't make it a good or effective policy, but it at least makes it less regressive, as a consumption tax increase.

broadly speaking, these retaliatory tariffs will have little effect on purchasing decisions by canadians and therefore have little effect on foreign suppliers. rather, they are just a means for the government to generate revenue, and are in a real sense an undoing of the gst decision in the 80s, which shifted import taxes to sales taxes. we're bringing back the tax importers used to pay before mulroney abolished it and converted it into a sales tax.

if that's what we're doing, can we cut the gst, then, too?

if it's just a revenue generating mechanism, which is what it is, it should be strenuously opposed as a cynical way to introduce a tax increase. why should canadians pay for this? let the americans pay for it. tax them, not us.

i'm not an economist. i have a math degree, some experience solving economics problems in calculus and algebra courses, a few economics themed math courses (third year linear programming was very economics focused, 4th year automata theory is a computer math course with applications in economics and linguistics, 4th year game theory had major applications in economics, i took a number of courses in differential equations from 2nd-5th year which are used in engineering and economics, etc), economics 101/102, a three year sociology of law degree and some experience reading policies, as a 44 year old. the number of math courses i took that were cross-referenced as economics courses, together with economics 101/102, would give me enough credits for a minor in economics, if i applied for it. that's it.

i would also have a minor in physics if i applied for it due to the number of math courses i took that were cross-referenced as physics courses, on top of the degrees in math, computer science and sociology of law. i am a little bit short on minors in music and english lit, but not by much. i have only taken a total of two history courses, both in greek history (classical and byzantine). then, there's a lot of topics where i have a credit or two  - biology, chemistry, psychology, philosophy, etc.

so, it doesn't take much education or very deep reasoning to figure out that these supposed "retaliatory tariffs" will have no meaningful effect on american suppliers and are just a regressive tax increase on canadian consumers.

if you paid 30% more for florida sourced tropicana instead of mexican sourced walmart orange juice, you'll pay an extra 25%, too. etc. these aren't major price hikes per unit, it's a dollar per orange juice jug, or a couple of extra bucks for a 40 of whiskey. it's just a regressive, revenue generating consumption tax, and we're being suckered into it by politicians wrapping themselves in the flag to promote it.

i don't support this at all.

consumption taxes are regressive.

tax them, not me.

https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/business/politics/2025/03/12/canada-to-announce-298-billion-in-retaliatory-tariffs-on-us-official-tells-reuters/

see, this is why i didn't want ford talking to trump.

ford thinks that by lifting the export tax he's making progress towards a resolution that can benefit both sides.

in trump's mind, he just tricked the fatass dummy ford into removing the export tax, and then suckered him with a 25% tariff. and, basically, trump is right, that's exactly what he did. trump then defines that as being "smart" and "good negotiating". he "wins". further, he's proven that canada is weak and stupid and easy to take advantage of, so he will therefore continue to take advantage of canada in the future.

that's how america operates and has operated for 250 years.

if trump actually understood tariffs, he'd be dangerous.

but ford is a buffoon and he couldn't negotiate himself out of a parking ticket. he should at least send a trade negotiator. he won't, he'll go himself.

the feds need to lock him in a closet and tell him not to come out until they're done.

this is extremely alarming.

this can't continue.

https://nationalpost.com/opinion/federal-report-deems-it-racist-to-criticize-canadian-anti-israel-activists

trudeau's government seemed to be intentionally exceedingly pro-muslim, and that seems to come from a personal interest in the religion from the man himself, who was famously photographed in blackface as an arab sheikh before he became prime minister and seems to view the aga kahn exceedingly fondly, perhaps as result of his mother having had an affair with him, as one of the dozens of women he was sleeping with as a young british aristocrat. 

justin trudeau has a far greater resemblance to the aga kahn than he does to pierre trudeau.

google "young aga kahn".

margaret was in the right place at the right time. the public line is that she was friends with his sister. right.

this is going to have to be addressed and moderated one way or another. it would be helpful if carney can set that in motion, even if he doesn't last very long in office.

https://nationalpost.com/opinion/ivison-mark-carney-donald-trump-tariffs

well, we have to have a reason to think we're not americans and for a lot of people, the government of the country at most levels as the primary example, that's lacking. if canada wants to have the same culture, follow the same ideology, use the same laws, etc as the americans, then why not just become american? an american citizenship card is a valuable item.

i don't want to support a canadian government if it just wants to be all about free markets. if carney and ford and smith want to work a room by pushing market theory and competition, they may find a muted response. those are american ideas. one of the basic differences between canada and the united states has been that canada is a more socialist country, more willing to use government to solve problems, and less interested in market economies. if you ask a canadian on the street to come up with a reason they don't want to be americans, besides a beer commercial, the first and last thing a lot of us will say is we don't want to lose our healthcare.

there's an opportunity to enforce this, but the governments we've elected recently aren't aligned with historical canadian values. it was nice to hear chretien talk on sunday, as he might have been the last truly canadian prime minister and, at 91, he might represent the end of a culture and be the last of his people, so to say. yoda, indeed. justin trudeau, mark carney, chrystia freeland, michael ignatieff, stephen harper, doug ford, danielle smith, etc have their differences, but they all share the characteristic that they are culturally american and have spent their entire political careers wanting canada to be america lite, either as some kind of california north or as some kind of more enlightened texas. that's not going to work with a lot of people, who are going to wonder what the point is.

if we remember that being canadian means using government, and use it to retreat from the reliance on market-based solutions we've seen dominate politics since the turn of the century, we might find more people want to remain canadian. if we keep copying america, we might find people think there's less purpose to it, and they may start to look at the positives of the alternative.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/trump-annexation-destabilizing-canada-1.7479890