Economy
The wall of death for western economies
From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy
This is an easy fix – you just have to demand it
When I drove 20,000 miles through rural America a few years back, I was struck by the dilapidated nature of, well, just about everything. The towns were rundown, there were thousands of abandoned farms and ranches and family houses. Sidewalks broken, every other shop was abandoned. Fields ran untended, forests filled with brush and fire ladders, hangers-on in trailers with a junkyard dog and rifle racks on trucks. Hunting was a necessity, not a sport.
In sharp contrast I grew up in a country village of 500 surrounded by tidy productive prosperous farms, and we were a going concern with stone and brick buildings, and beautiful crafted family houses, lawns and weirs, a village pond with ducks, mature trees. Some estates, but not vulgar monstrosities like today. Everyone adult chipped in. It was vivid, active, close-connected, multi-generational and I never wanted to leave.
What the hell happened?
I didn’t fully understand until a hydrologist in Denver, retired from a career at the Department of Interior, told me at lunch in an Olive Garden, that in the mid-70’s, the blanket instructions coming down from DC switched from enabling business and development to preventing it. He, in his retirement, had a small ranch and on his wells, four meters from four different federal and state bureaucracies, indicating just how closely he was being surveilled. Over the years, regulations had come down so thick and punitive, near everyone operated in a catch-22 situation. You might hurdle one set of regs, only to discover that your success meant another set of regs cancelled you. It was so irrational it was fiendish, I thought to myself. Now of course, I see it as actually fiendish, the work of evil. The government was deliberately ruining peoples’ lives, drawing them down, impoverishing them, with malice.
The only prosperity to be seen was in the rather splendid buildings of the Army Corps of Engineers, and the palatial “farmhouses” owned by what I came to recognize as government farmers, the ones who had lobbied hard and got all the subsidies. Oh yes, and ethanol plants, one of the first green scams. They ate money.
Last week I was in the provincial capital near me, picking up something in Oak Bay Village, ultra-posh in a villagy Englishy way, half-timbered buildings, human-scaled, friendly. And found it to be in the same state, everything covered in a wash of grey, empty shops, abandoned stores, people shriveled and tired. I used to take my mother shopping there, and since she died, hadn’t had the heart to go back. Therefore I was disturbed, even shocked at the change. If the prettiest street in the prettiest city in Canada, visited by millions of tourists a year was dying….I’m sorry, Leading Indicator.
If the prettiest street in the prettiest city in Canada, visited by millions of tourists a year was dying….I’m sorry, Leading Indicator.
In fact, in Canada, even the food banks are running out of food. Bodies are piling up in mortuaries because people can’t afford to bury their dead. Chronically injured soldiers are offered Medically Assisted Dying in lieu of treatment. MAID has saved the “free” health system $90 million in end-of-life care, since it began. So we have to expect more of that.
A recent report showed the MAID drugs mean you drown to death, but are paralyzed so can’t communicate your distress. That means you can drown for 45 minutes before you actually die – autopsies have proved it. That is how careless our health bureaucracy is. I cannot watch another single mother weeping on TikTok because she cannot feed her children and is always sick. Another once athletic mountain climber sit in a wheelchair detailing her story of neurological pain so intense after vaccine, her husband had to sit with her so she wouldn’t kill herself. Every bureaucracy is killing us.
The U.S. still has the healthiest economy in the world. The thirteen other less rich countries are in per capita recession, which means GDP per person is shrinking: Canada, France, Germany, UK, Australia. Japan just registered a -2% growth rate, but it is already a zombie economy with families living paycheck to paycheck. Like addicts.
It may be that all I have is a hammer but, to me, this is due to impossible green mandates, the choking of energy supplies, the insane expense of green energy infrastructure which doesn’t produce and doesn’t “save money” and above all regulation that means that every job in a small cap public company labors under $50,000 of government ESG mandates. For every $1 you pay your average employee, you pay the government $1.50. That’s before taxes. Not that you have any income to tax. Government is literally eating us alive.
The U.S., according to Bloomberg, is facing a Wall of Death. Or Debt. Bloomberg says 42% of small public companies are losing money; not only that they face a $832 billion wall of debt, $600 billion of which comes due at much much higher interest rates in the next two years.
Let’s be really clear about where that debt came from. It came from people like our Fed Chair who asset stripped all these companies, loaded them with debt, mis-stated their value and sold them on. This is how Jerome Powell made his $50,000,000. He ruined a widget manufacturer. That debt is his dirty-but-not illegal play; his fortune, his I got mine and now I’m in “public service”. Suffer you peons, suffer more. And the dirty profoundly unethical play of all his associates. When Warren Buffet says he has $180 billion in cash because the market is over-valued, that is down to him and his pals loading up every small and medium manufacturer in the U.S. with debt, selling them on, whereupon another pirate buys the company, mis-states its value, borrows a bunch of money against it, raises the price, and sells it on. ALL small cap street profits in the fifteen years come from that criminal activity by our financial elites. Of course the market is over-valued. They over-valued it to steal from it.
The big companies only carry 50% of the debt of small caps. For small caps, the absolute heroes in this story, in the first quarter of 2024, their sales rose .3%, but inflation for that quarter was 1.1%. Bank of America says that small cap earnings will drop by one-third in the next year. Thanks to the miracle of Bidenomics, sales are dead other than the doom spending of hopeless millennials.
In contrast, big companies have gained 14% and big tech stocks earn 90% of all the gains. Where do you think the next play might be? That’s right, tech.
Median priced houses are now worth 7.8 times median income, twice the normal level, that ratio even above the housing bubble of 08. Housing prices are slated to rise 20% in the next year. One in five renters are either skipping meals or selling personal belongings to make rent. Rents will rise double digits in the coming year according to the New York Fed. Millennials have given up, reverting to a nihilistic hand-to-mouth existence.
According to economist Peter St. Onge, who aggregated many of the above states, the first twenty rungs of the ladder have been knocked out.
This is due entirely to the gutting of the heartland, the shipping of manufacturing to the CCP slave state, and the subsequent financialization of the economy. Value is now calculated on the future labor of people whose jobs are being killed off. They are financializing something that is dying. They know it, you know it, the government knows it.
The core reason for the invasion at the border is for immigrants they can pay dirt wages to keep the whole thing going for a few more years. Your kids, your future? Forget about it.
Of course the bankers have a solution. You know they do. It’s not a sensible, compassionate, creative and exciting solution whereby your life and mine is going to get much much better. It is a solution that means your kids and grandkids are going to live in a world wrought with poverty-driven crime, and dying cities and towns. But never mind! The market will make out like a bandit. The secret lies in the fact that 90% of all gains are currently being made by the digital aristocracy.
That will continue and this is how. To make up for destroying production, the government and markets will list you, your house, yard, cars, boats etc., as a federal asset. As well as national parks, conservation areas, wildlife areas, all ecological study zones, and so on. Then they will borrow against it. Everything you own, because of our federal debt, will be theirs.
The secret, obviously lies in the fact that currently 90% of all gains being made by the digital aristocracy,
It’s the only way. We are de-developing; correction, we are being forced to de-develop. We are de-industrializing, and our hard assets, our water, land and mineral resources are being sequestered from use. We cannot use anything to build anything. We won’t even own our houses, our gardens. We will have a senior partner in our financial lives who tells us what we may do and how much oxygen and water and power we may use. We are finished. We are future peasants.
The Play
Earlier this year, American Stewards, a few state governors and a handful of Congress people managed to stop the SEC from installing a rule allowing for the financialization of America’s national parks. But under the radar, because no media does any work whatsoever on this file, the Biden administration has reworked the proposal. Herewith is what is happening in the U.S.
The 2030 Agenda means that 30% of America’s lands have to be turned into a nature preserve by 2030. All those withdrawals from use hold incredible natural wealth and beauty never to be used or seen by Americans. The April 22, 2024, Fact Sheet notes some of the significant land and mineral withdrawals made to help reach 30×30. That wealth could be used by Americans to build cities and companies and full-on effulgent family and community lives. But it is to be locked away. How much is being locked away? The Biden administration estimates that land held privately, one-third of the U.S. to be worth $32 Trillion. So 2030 lands are worth $32 trillion.
So the idea is to lock away at least $32 trillion worth of resources. While people can’t make their rent. While single mothers weep and beg on socials. While people are electing to die because it is too expensive to live. While an entire generation has no hope and is descending into nihilism.
American Stewards reported the two significant Earth Day announcements released from the White House
“The Administration has already protected more than 41 million acres of lands and waters, and President Biden is on track to conserve more lands and waters than any President in history. This includes establishing five new national monuments and restoring protections for three more; creating four new national wildlife refuges and expanding five more; protecting the Boundary Waters of Minnesota, the nation’s most visited wilderness area; safeguarding Bristol Bay in southwest Alaska; and withdrawing Chaco Canyon in New Mexico and Thompson Divide in Colorado from further oil and gas leasing to protect thousands of sacred sites and pristine lands.”
Next, they unveiled a new website, conservation.gov that houses the American Conservation and Stewardship Atlas mapping tool. The Atlas was created to track the progress of 30×30 including the protected status of the lands as well as quantifying natural processes such as photosynthesis and pollination used to manufacture an arbitrary ecosystem service value.”
This is where the digital comes in. All those lands have to be surveilled. All those assets, including you and your house and your car, have to be surveilled. The money that will require installing these surveillance tools will be made by the digital titans, because that’s where the money is, now that lands, resources, labor have been destroyed.
As American Stewards reports: in January of 2023, the White House announced the “National Strategy to Develop Statistics for Environmental – Economic Statistics.” Since then, they have been working to establish a methodology to value the ecosystem services.
There are four accounts: Land, Water, Air Emissions and Economic Activity.
The Pilot Land Account measures the economic activity and total market value for all the land in the United States, 2.3 billion acres. They estimate that at around $100 trillion, which includes the 30% owned by humans.
In essence, the administration is conscripting private citizens’ land to secure the national debt, unbeknown to the American people and Congress. And using common land as well. Common land is owned by the people of the country, not the government and not the Nature Conservancy. It is yours. But, they are developing mechanisms to make it theirs. This is the first step.
The Pilot National Air Emissions Account “measures greenhouse gas emissions associated with specific industries on a national scale.” And you. Your CO2 emissions will be tracked and your allowance measured.
Ten years ago I sat in a rancher’s house deep in Wyoming and he told me that his land would be used as collateral for the National Debt that China holds. I felt dread in the pit of my stomach because I felt instinctively he was right. Subsequently, I don’t know how many people told me that was impossible, I was wrong, he was wrong, crazy.
No baby, we weren’t wrong. They are monetizing all public and private land to pay or support the national debt. And the way they are doing it, is by shutting down economic activity, across the board. We will be a resource to be played, monetized, surveilled and restricted for the profits of the market, and the destructive machinations of the bureaucracy.
And all the money to be made from it is digital. And that money, those resources they are stealing? They belong to us.
In my next article, I will describe in detail the players in this game, how the National Security State, Mossad, the PayPal Mafia, Drexel Burnam heirs, President Trump’s economic advisers, are working to destroy the hope of South and Central America. It is complex, fiendish and fascinating. This series starting today, points out that the Green takeover, mostly surreptitious, is driving the world’s economy into the dirt. It is based on falsified science, and convoluted financial ideas that fail repeatedly. Fix this, and we will be living in a Golden Age.
Elizabeth Nickson is a Senior Fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy. Her studies and commentaries at the Frontier Centre can be accessed here. Follow her on Substack here. Her best-selling book Eco-Fascists can be purchased here.
Not for the first time, the Macdonald-Laurier Institute’s Policymaker of the Year is not a Canadian.
In 2019, our laureate was Xi Jinping, leader of the People’s Republic of China, whose long arm reached far into many aspects of policymaking in our nation’s capital.
That helps to underline our intention in conferring this recognition. Policy influence can be used to Canada’s benefit or detriment. In naming our annual Policymaker of the Year, MLI does not endorse their policies; instead, we seek to draw to the attention of Canadians those people who have had the most influence on public policy in this country – for good or ill – in the past year.
And in 2025, who can deny that US President Donald Trump, the Disruptor-in-Chief, has exercised an outsized influence on Canadians – on their hopes and fears, on their political preferences, and, most importantly for our purposes, on the policies pursued by the Canadian government?
How has Donald Trump spurred policy change in Canada? Let us count the ways:
First, set aside for the moment any focus on specific policy areas and just think about the President’s style and strategy. Anyone who has read The Art of the Deal knows that Trump is quite straightforward in avowing that his dealmaking strategy sets out to frighten and intimidate the other party with a degree of unpredictability, bravado, and unwillingness to be bound by past assumptions that is sometimes just breathtaking to contemplate.
On the other hand, what on the surface appears to his opponents as simply irrational is in fact nothing of the sort. He sets out to frighten and intimidate, but he also sets out to get deals done, which cannot happen with negotiating partners paralyzed by fear. And in fact, the list of deals he has done in less than a year in office is impressive: NATO members have made big commitments to increase defence spending, the war in Gaza is paused by a (shaky) ceasefire of his design, trade deals have been struck with many partners, including the EU, the UK, Mexico, and even China … though notably, not with Canada.
Here at home, Trump has riled Canadians with his comments about annexation and disputed borders, laid a heavy finger on the 2025 electoral scales, and met repeatedly with Prime Minister Mark Carney – but equally repeatedly sent him on his way with little to show for the Prime Minister’s efforts as supplicant. Policies that seemed settled, like our purchase of the F-35 fighter jet, our deep integration with the US economy, and our feeble attempts at even-handedness in the conflict in the Middle East, all seem to have fallen victim to Ottawa’s ill-advised urge to stick a finger in Donald Trump’s eye, whatever the cost.
Like it or not, Trump has reminded Canadians in no uncertain terms that America is the elephant and we are, if not exactly a mouse, certainly a beast whose wellbeing depends on American forbearance and good will. The question of whether we can calm the rampaging elephant and charm him into a better humour or fall back on much less profitable relations with other countries far away is THE question that will preoccupy policymakers in Ottawa this year and for several years to come.
It is against this backdrop that several major dimensions of Canada-US relations have been thrust into the spotlight – none more dramatically than trade.
Weaponized Tariffs and Fractured Trade
Tim Sargent
For many Canadians, Donald Trump’s re-election on November 5, 2024, while not a cause for celebration, was also not an existential threat to our economy. After all, when Trump was first elected in 2016, his threats to tear up the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) ultimately came to nothing, and the new version of NAFTA that was negotiated by the US, Canada, and Mexico (we call it CUSMA, the Americans call it USMCA), was broadly similar to its predecessor, with almost all Canadian goods able to enter the US market tariff-free.
That complacency was almost immediately shattered when the President, even before his inauguration, announced his intent to slap a tariff of 25 per cent on Canadian (and Mexican exports), supposedly in response to Canada’s failure to stop fentanyl from crossing over the US border. The shock was rapid, and the implications unmistakable.
Once in office, Trump made good on his threat and imposed the 25 per cent tariff on all Canadian exports except energy, which was subject to “only” a 10 per cent tariff. The sheer interconnectedness of the North American economy forced Trump to partially back down and exempt CUSMA-compliant goods from the tariffs. However, because they raised input costs for US manufacturers, Trump opened another front by slapping tariffs on steel, aluminum, autos, copper, lumber, and furniture in the name of national security, overriding the CUSMA treaty that he had signed. While these tariffs apply to all countries, these are all commodities for which Canadian exporters are very dependent on the US market, and which are very important for the Canadian economy.
While trade disputes with the US have not been unknown since the signing of the original Canada-US Free Trade Agreement in 1988 – softwood lumber is the most obvious example – no one expected Trump to take aim at the whole Canada–US trading relationship, which accounts for almost a quarter of our GDP. This escalation marks a break not just with economic norms but with decades of strategic restraint.
None of this augers well for the negotiations for the renewal of CUSMA, which are supposed to conclude in the summer of 2026, or the broader Canada-US trading relationship. Indeed, it is not clear that the renewal document will be worth the paper it is written on, given that Trump has shown no compunction in violating the terms of the original agreement. Perhaps even more fundamentally, the President, reflecting a broader strand of America-first nationalism, simply does not see trade as a mutually beneficial activity; rather, it is a zero-sum game in which the only way for the US to win is for others to lose. The fact that basic economics says the opposite seems to be neither here nor there.
All this leaves Canadian policymakers with some unpleasant alternatives. While the Carney government originally attempted to retaliate by imposing tariffs of its own, the reality is that these are pinpricks to the US, for which Canadian exports are only a few percentage points of GDP. Furthermore, tariffs hurt Canadian consumers. The other alternative, which the government is now pursuing, is to diversify Canada’s trade away from the US. However, Canadian governments have been trying to reduce their reliance on the United States since at least the 1970s, with little success. Geography and economic gravity continue to dominate: the US will always be the most obvious market for our exports, even with tariffs.
Perhaps the most that Canadians can hope for is that Americans will, as has happened in the past, come to realize that a close and stable trading relationship with Canada is in their national interest just as much as it is in ours.
Trade Tensions Fuel Canadian Oil Revival
Heather Exner-Pirot
Donald Trump’s tariffs and threat to the Canadian economy have meaningfully shifted both the public understanding and attitude towards oil and gas. Perhaps in the past it could be seen simply as something Alberta produced, an embarrassing source of global emissions. After 2025, it became clear how essential oil production is both to our economic health and our global standing.
Oil is Canada’s largest export, and most of it goes to the United States. When Trump declared in January 2025 that “we don’t need their oil and gas. We have more than anybody,” it was a tell. Canadian oil and gas is precisely the thing we produce that the United States needs more than anything else. In fact, that same month the US imported a record amount of Canadian crude oil: 4.27 million barrels; the most any country has ever imported from another in the history of the world.
This newfound appreciation of oil and its geopolitical importance brought a long-dead idea back to life: an oil pipeline to the northwest coast of British Columbia, the value of which has always been in diversifying our market for heavy oil from the US to Asia. The source of hard fought culture wars in the 2010s before being approved in 2014, rejected by Trudeau in 2018, and handed the final indignity of a tanker ban in 2019, a Northern Gateway-type pipeline is now not only possible, but even likely. In every public opinion poll in 2025, such a pipeline has enjoyed majority support. It is the centrepiece of the landmark MOU between the federal and Alberta government that has as an explicit goal increasing oil and gas production.
Canada has always had the resources of an energy superpower. Trump’s threats have done more to give us the ambition of one than anyone or anything before him.
“Elbows up” and the New Anti-American Nationalism
Mark Reid
Donald Trump’s return to the White House drastically altered the course of Canadian politics. The ensuing fallout – fuelled by threats of tariffs and incendiary “51st state” rhetoric – became the key catalyst that propelled Mark Carney’s Liberals to victory on an “elbows up” platform.
This resurgent Canadian nationalism was defined by a sharp strain of anti-Americanism in general, and a profound dislike of Trump in particular.
As Trump slapped tariffs on Canada (and mused about annexing Greenland), the Prime Minister and provincial leaders promised a “Team Canada” approach to counter the President’s aggression. Canadian politicians from coast to coast earnestly vowed to remove interprovincial trade barriers, back major national projects, and present a common front.
That unity quickly faded.
Faced with new rounds of tariff threats, Carney’s government shifted to diplomatic conciliation, rolling back the Digital Sales Tax and offering border security concessions to avert economic disaster. Supporters called it pragmatism; critics called it a surrender.
Meanwhile, the Team Canada vision turned out to be a mirage. Interprovincial squabbles over a bitumen pipeline to tidewater in BC persists, while a multi-million-dollar Ontario anti-tariff ad, which aired on US television, infuriated Trump.
These internal divisions underscore a dangerous reality: Canada’s very sovereignty may be at risk. The US President’s recent “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine clearly articulates his vision of American hegemony over the Americas, with Canada, presumably, as a sort of vassal state. The federal government now faces an impossible task – buying time in the hope that the US political climate shifts, while protecting Canadian autonomy from an American president who sees it as negotiable.
Smashing the Overton Window on social policy
Peter Copeland
Donald Trump is polarizing for good reason. He is rude, crude, lewd, and norm-breaking to an extraordinary degree: a former Manhattan Democrat and social liberal whose transgressiveness and contempt for precedent embody many of the very cultural tendencies the left has long celebrated. His impulsiveness seems to threaten alliances and raise geopolitical risks by the day – yet he now leads the most effective conservative movement in decades.
He also possesses unusual strengths. His entrepreneurial instinct has allowed him to see the gap created by an oblivious, or unwilling, left- and right- establishment political class on trade, immigration, cultural and social decline – and to seize the opportunity. His unfiltered political style contrasts sharply with the scripted, risk-averse habits of career politicians and the professional-managerial class. He seeks no validation from the Davos set or the media-academic establishment, making him unafraid to challenge orthodoxy. Trump’s rise is a sharp indictment of liberal elites on both sides of the political spectrum, who proved incapable of addressing the deep social and economic issues that he foregrounded from the outset of his presidency.
On issues like gender identity, DEI, and mass migration, rooted in an extreme open-society ideology of hyper-individualism and autonomy, establishment leaders had long been unwilling even to acknowledge the problems. Then Trump came along and threw open the Overton window on just about every issue.
For Canada, Trump’s impact is mixed. He expanded the envelope of the politically possible on topics thought untouchable just years ago, but his abrasive style has made Canadian elites – whose defining characteristic is anti-Americanism – more reluctant to pursue parallel reforms. On immigration, borders and defence, Ottawa is now moving; on gender, DEI, and education, it is retreating behind “Trump did it, so we won’t.”
Shredding Canada’s US security blanket
Richard Shimooka
President Trump’s successful upending of American foreign policy in 2025 has had profound and potentially long-term consequences, but few are as acutely felt as the changes he has forced upon the Canada-US security relationship. Trump’s actions have effectively ended the decades-long expectation that the United States would forever underwrite Canada’s defence and security, forcing a sea-change in Ottawa’s strategic calculus.
Since the Second World War, the foundation of the Canada-US security and economic relationship has been an interlocking system of security guarantees through alliances and free trade blocs. This synergistic mix, which bound states like Canada to a rules and values based international order conceived in Washington, allowed Canada to maintain a relatively small defence footprint, relying instead on overwhelming American firepower to deter its enemies.
However, Trump’s skepticism towards this foundation, evident since his first term, consolidated into decisive policy changes in his second term. By launching a devastatingly counterproductive trade war against Canada and other major trading partners and directly questioning the value of major alliances like NATO, he effectively declared America’s security commitments are no longer unconditional.
For Canada, this has meant a new urgency to foot a larger portion of the bill for continental security, a renewed focus on securing both the Canada-US border and the Arctic, and for finally meeting long-standing pledges to spend two per cent of GDP on NATO.
Ironically, while Trump’s pressure tactics have succeeding in pushing Canada (and other allies like Japan and Germany) to increase defence spending and become more self-sufficient, it comes at the cost of America’s ability to lead like-minded states. As US leverage wanes, Trump’s strategy may end up pushing America’s allies into the arms of strategic rivals like China.
Without American global leadership, states may prioritize a narrower brand of self-interest – one that is counterproductive to America’s overall strategic ends. Observe how Canada is now looking to rebuild its economic relationship with the People’s Republic of China, not merely for trade, but as a deliberate economic counterweight to its highly integrated trade relationship with the United States.
This impulse will likely be shared by many US allies. Indeed, allied nations in Southeast Asia may begin to doubt Washington’s commitment to the current geopolitical alignment and seek to balance their relationship with China. Some may even fall further into Beijing’s grasp, becoming the 21st-century equivalent of tributary states.
“Trump the Peacemaker” and the Politics of Force
Casey Babb
Donald Trump’s bold and fearless foreign policy decisions – especially regarding Israel’s war in Gaza and the broader Middle East – make him one of the most consequential and transformative political leaders in a generation. His combination of disruption, recalibration, and strategic risk-taking sought to redirect the trajectory of the Middle East in ways few leaders have attempted.
Some of these changes began during Trump’s first administration. The Abraham Accords, which normalized relations between Israel and several Arab states, reflected a shift toward open regional co-operation against shared security concerns. His decisions, like recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and cutting aid to Palestinian institutions, were commonsense corrections to what he viewed as unnecessary diplomatic ambiguities.
However, his most transformative actions in the Middle East happened in the aftermath of the October 7, 2023, Hamas terror attacks on Israel. From his 20-point plan for peace in Gaza and his efforts to bring home hostages, to the “12 Day War” between Israel and Iran, Trump made it clear that America’s support for Israel remains unwavering – signalling that Washington is willing to take decisive action in the Middle East to protect US and allied security.
Beyond the Middle East, Trump’s approach to China marked a sharp departure from previous presidents. Replacing engagement tactics with tariffs, export controls, and the framing of China as a key rival, Trump pushed for a shift in US policy that continues in his second term in office.
In Europe, Trump’s record on the Russia-Ukraine war is mixed. The President has pressured NATO allies to carry a greater load in terms of supporting Ukraine, and the US has continued to provide Kyiv with lethal military aid. However, critics worry about Trump’s personal relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin: as the peace negotiations continue, will Ukraine eventually be sacrificed for American expediency?
Conclusion
Trump’s legacy remains unwritten. It may destabilize Western institutions, or it may be the jolt needed to shake a complacent boomer establishment out of its decadent, dogmatic slumbers.
Trump has clearly shifted the geopolitical landscape in both Canada and around the world – in ways no conventional figure could have. It is worth asking: would Europe have increased defence spending without American pressure? Would Canada have taken border security, immigration, defence, or energy policy seriously?
Even conservative governments – often differing little from liberal ones in practice – have lacked the capital or resolve to confront entrenched bureaucracies, and it remains doubtful whether any old-school Canadian libertarian-oriented fusionist, or a typical Wall Street Republican in the US, would have had what it took to win, yet alone enact the needed the reforms.
Trump was, and is, very much the man for the moment. Whether this shift leads to renewal or decline, only time will tell. Those same disruptive instincts have defined his approach to the world stage as well, reshaping geopolitics in ways Canadians cannot ignore.
Brian Lee Crowley is managing director of the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.
Tim Sargent is a senior fellow and the director of Domestic Policy at MLI.
Heather Exner-Pirot is a senior fellow and MLI’s director of Energy, Natural Resources, and the Environment.
Mark Reid is the senior editor at MLI.
Peter Copeland is the deputy director of Domestic Policy at MLI.
Richard Shimooka is a senior fellow at MLI.
Casey Babb is the director of MLI’s The Promised Land program.
People criticize capitalism. A recent Axios-Generation poll says, “College students prefer socialism to capitalism.”
Why?
Because they believe absurd myths. Like the claim that the Soviet Union “wasn’t real socialism.”
Socialism guru Noam Chomsky tells students that. He says the Soviet Union “was about as remote from socialism as you could imagine.”
Give me a break.
The Soviets made private business illegal.
If that’s not socialism, I’m not sure what is.
“Socialism means abolishing private property and … replacing it with some form of collective ownership,” explains economist Ben Powell. “The Soviet Union had an abundance of that.”
Socialism always fails. Look at Venezuela, the richest country in Latin America about 40 years ago. Now people there face food shortages, poverty, misery and election outcomes the regime ignores.
But Al Jazeera claims Venezuela’s failure has “little to do with socialism, and a lot to do with poor governance … economic policies have failed to adjust to reality.”
“That’s the nature of socialism!” exclaims Powell. “Economic policies fail to adjust to reality. Economic reality evolves every day. Millions of decentralized entrepreneurs and consumers make fine tuning adjustments.”
Political leaders can’t keep up with that.
Still, pundits and politicians tell people, socialism does work — in Scandinavia.
“Mad Money’s Jim Cramer calls Norway “as socialist as they come!”
This too is nonsense.
“Sweden isn’t socialist,” says Powell. “Volvo is a private company. Restaurants, hotels, they’re privately owned.”
Norway, Denmark and Sweden are all free market economies.
Denmark’s former prime minister was so annoyed with economically ignorant Americans like Bernie Sanders calling Scandanavia “socialist,” he came to America to tell Harvard students that his country “is far from a socialist planned economy. Denmark is a market economy.”
Powell says young people “hear the preaching of socialism, about equality, but they don’t look on what it actually delivers: poverty, starvation, early death.”
For thousands of years, the world had almost no wealth creation. Then, some countries tried capitalism. That changed everything.
“In the last 20 years, we’ve seen more humans escape extreme poverty than any other time in human history, and that’s because of markets,” says Powell.
Capitalism makes poor people richer.
Former Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.) calls capitalism “slavery by another name.”
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) claims, “No one ever makes a billion dollars. You take a billion dollars.”
That’s another myth.
People think there’s a fixed amount of money. So when someone gets rich, others lose.
But it’s not true. In a free market, the only way entrepreneurs can get rich is by creating new wealth.
Yes, Steve Jobs pocketed billions, but by creating Apple, he gave the rest of us even more. He invented technology that makes all of us better off.
“I hope that we get 100 new super billionaires,” says economist Dan Mitchell, “because that means 100 new people figured out ways to make the rest of our lives better off.”
Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich advocates the opposite: “Let’s abolish billionaires,” he says.
He misses the most important fact about capitalism: it’s voluntary.
“I’m not giving Jeff Bezos any money unless he’s selling me something that I value more than that money,” says Mitchell.
It’s why under capitalism, the poor and middle class get richer, too.
“The economic pie grows,” says Mitchell. “We are much richer than our grandparents.”
When the media say the “middle class is in decline,” they’re technically right, but they don’t understand why it’s shrinking.
“It’s shrinking because more and more people are moving into upper income quintiles,” says Mitchell. “The rich get richer in a capitalist society. But guess what? The rest of us get richer as well.”
I cover more myths about socialism and capitalism in my new video.
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