This Week’s News
Only a little over a week after I published “The Insatiable Beast” describing how the government always gets “its” money and is never satisfied, the news appears full of fresh stories about governments looking for new ways to take and spend our money.
There are a few ways to get a feel for who will win the next presidential election, following the polls and listening to the pundits being two obvious examples, but for my money the most fun is tracking how people are betting. So each Friday until the election we will take a look at this site, which takes a combination bookie/stock market approach to the election and see what the gamblers think. Today:
Biden 48 cents
Trump 46 cents
I posted the first half of the Canadian version of “Are you better off than you were 4 years ago” piece a few days ago and never being one to pass up beating a dead horse thought I’d look at a few headlines that bare on the topic. Since the Liberal party’s strategy appears to center on “free” stuff, let’s call this section “Can’t Buy Me Love” (or at least I hope not):
“$10-a-day” Childcare - $30 Billion
Free Contraception and Diabetes Medications - $1 Billion and this assumes the government will be able to negotiate a reduction in drug prices. If not, this number could double or triple…and let’s be honest, when was the last time a government didn’t overpromise and underdeliver?
National School Lunch Plan - $1 Billion
Housing Infrastructure Fund – $6 Billion on top of the $4 Billion allotted to the “Housing Accelerator” fund last year.
The issue here isn’t that some or all of these aren’t worthy programs, the issue is that resources, of which money is one, are limited and priorities must be made. Every $27.5M spent by the government is $1 out of the taxpayer’s pockets so the list above amounts to $1,527 per taxpayer. That’s if every taxpayer had to pay and we know that won’t be the case.
The Liberals “giveth with one hand and…” actually, this probably just counts as more giving but in this case, they’re giving to themselves. To be specific, they’re giving themselves a4.4% pay increase bringing the average MP salary to over $200k and Trudeau’s to $406,200, which doesn’t even include the hundreds of thousands taxpayers spend on his family vacations each year.
All this spending may explain why when asked who they trust most to “responsibly manage the finances of the Government of Canada,” more chose “I trust none” (21%) over the Liberals (19%). Showing a rare understanding of the impact of “free” services, only 10% of Canadians chose the NDP. The Conservative Party led the list with 35%.
It looks like the only thing the Liberals think shouldn’t be free is speech. However, just when you thought Canada was leading the world in something – ok, we do lead the world in assisted suicides. Yay us! – along comes the Scots. Scotland’s “Hate Crime and Public Order Act” came into effect Monday with a new crime of “Stirring up hatred.” J, K. Rowling (she wrote a couple of semi-popular novels a while back) criticized the law coming down on the side of free speech (who would have thought a writer would be against censorship) and in a series of tweets, referred to a number of transwomen as men and invited the police to arrest her.
Apple Exploring 'Mobile Robot' That 'Follows Users Around Their Homes' – I hate Siri and my cat already does this so I’m good.
What I’m Reading
The Death of American Journalism – Max Tani over at Semafor examines the challenges facing journalist and determines that there are “at least five major factors” hurting the profession.
Scheduled Death – As I mentioned earlier, Canada leads the world in assisted suicides but despite the questionable morality of the practice other nations appear eager to enact their own laws. Rupa Subramanya, writing for The Free Press, wonders if in their enthusiasm to extend euthanasia to everyone, including the mentally ill, right-to-die activists aren’t making suicide contagious.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Legality_of_assisted_suicide.svg#/media/File:Legality_of_assisted_suicide.svg
The birth of a post-entertainment culture -
on his The Honest Broker substack takes a look at “The State of the Culture, 2024” and argues that entertainment is dead and it its place we have “distraction” which itself “is just a stepping stone toward the real goal nowadays—which is addiction.”
My Podcast Recommendation(s) of the Week
I only have one recommendation this week for a change, The Reason Interview With Nick Gillespie - Why Palantir Cofounder Joe Lonsdale Left California for Texas. Lonsdale is the co-founder of Palantir, a data analytics, the cloud software firm OpenGov, which provides software services for governments, and the new University of Austin which seeks to “reverse the decline of higher education in America.” The interview touched on a number of topics including the dangers of too much bureaucracy (California), tracking government spending, and two topics which I find particularly interesting to me prison reform and homelessness.