Captain Airhead Looks in the Mirror and Sees an Idiot and Thinks He is Looking out the Window at all Canadians

 

In the last few weeks as Captain Airhead and his Grit minions have been on the defensive concerning their carbon tax and its upcoming scheduled increase they have given us cause more than once to ask the question of just how stupid they think Canadians are.   Take, for one example, the terminology with which they choose to frame the matter.  If you have tortured your ears by listening to them on the matter for more than a few seconds you will have undoubtedly heard the expression “price on pollution” umpteen million times. 

 

That sounds good, doesn’t it?  

 

They are making people pay for pollution.  That sounds like they are fining people for dumping garbage, sewage, and chemicals into the lakes and rivers or for producing the kind of toxic air quality that can be found primarily in large cities of the Third World.  The “price on pollution”, however, refers to a tax on the emission of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere through the burning of fossil fuels.   The emission of carbon dioxide is not pollution because carbon dioxide is not a pollutant but an essential component of the atmosphere.   Anybody with the most basic of scientific knowledge will be aware that human beings and other animal life take in oxygen when they breathe and breathe out carbon dioxide, which in turn is taken in by plant life that converts it to its use and gives off oxygen.

 

The Liberals must think Canadians are as ignorant of math as they seem to assume them to be of science.   They have been claiming that most Canadians receive more in carbon tax rebates than they pay in the carbon tax itself.   This is, of course, not true, and only a moron would think it to be true.  While governments are prone to spend more than they receive in revenue – the present Liberal government more than any other – the idea of a specific tax that comes with a rebate that exceeds what the tax takes in is ridiculous.   Perhaps you have seen the recent exchange between the evil ditz who is Captain Airhead’s deputy prime minister and Minister of Finance and the leader of His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition in which, having characterized the Conservative demand that the increase in the carbon tax be scrapped as a “cut” to the support Canadians receive from the government in the form of the carbon tax rebates, she said “that’s $1,800 Alberta families won’t get, that’s $1,120 Ontario families won’t get.”   The Conservative leader responded with the observation that according to the parliamentary budget officer “the carbon tax will cost Alberta families $2,943.”  Poilievre then aptly compared this to the actions of a bank robber who “thinks he’s virtuous because he tips the teller on the way out the door.”

 

The carbon tax costs households a lot more than just what they pay out directly on the purchase of energy.  Whenever they go to the grocery store to buy food the price they pay will include the carbon tax paid on the fuel needed to get that food from the farm to the distributor and from the distributor to the store and however many addition transportation steps there may be along the way.  The same, of course, is true of anything else the family buys at the store.   It is difficult to imagine any other single item a tax on which would produce a higher compound cost.   The carbon tax is not the only factor contributing to the inflation that has created an affordability crisis in Canada, but it is also not the only factor for which Captain Airhead and his cronies are responsible.  Indeed, everything they do looks like it was done because they weighed all their options and chose the one that would make life least affordable for the average Canadian.   The housing crisis is largely due to their insane policy of trying to bring as many immigrants and refugees into the country as possible, as fast as possible, regardless of economic, employment, and housing considerations.   It is starting to look like their even more insane policy of making it as quick and easy as possible for Canadians to get a doctor to murder them, euphemistically dubbed MAID – Medical Assistance in Dying – was designed to provide Canadians with a way to opt out of living with the hellish consequences of their misgoverning.   

 

These progressive nincompoops – and being a nincompoop, pronounced with extra stress on the last syllable, is a prerequisite for being a progressive – justify all of this with the words “climate change.”   This is their single biggest display of contempt for the knowledge and intelligence of the ordinary Canadian.  The idea that government should be fighting climate change rests upon the assumption that climate change is a bad thing.  Try telling that to people who lived through the end of an ice age.   You won’t be able to, of course, because the last ice age ended about halfway through the Victorian era but if someone from then were still alive to answer you they would testify that global warming was the best thing that ever happened to them.  The earth’s climate is not now nor has it ever been an unchanging constant.   It is the height of human hubris to think a) that it is all due to our activity and/or b) that we have the power to prevent or control it.   The sane and humble approach to climate change is to observe how the climate is changing to, note among the changes those which will make life easier and be thankful for them, and to note those that will make life more difficult and figure out how best to adjust ourselves so as to live with them.   That is far more sensible than acting like a cartoonish supervillain and trying to bend the world’s climate to our will no matter how many others the happiness and perhaps lives of whom we have to sacrifice in order so to do.

 

Mercifully, Canadians do not appear to be remotely as stupid as the progressives think them to be.  The approval rating of Captain Airhead and the Grits has gone the way of the Titanic and the defectors are not jumping on board the NDP ship which has sprung a leak from which the socialists are attempting to salvage the boat by bailing out the water with a sieve.  Judging from the defeat of the Conservatives motion for a no confidence vote yesterday we are likely going to have to wait for this session of Parliament to come to full term before we see the next Dominion Election.   The longer we have to wait, however, the sicker of both Captain Airhead and Jimmy Dhaliwal we will all become, and the greater their inevitable fall.

Thermidor is on its way.   May the Lord hasten its coming.

Captain Airhead’s Astounding Arrogance

 

On Sunday the fifteenth of August, it had not yet been a month since Mary Simon had been sworn into the office of Governor General of Canada, when a pestilential nuisance showed up on her doorstep at Rideau Hall to make a request.   One of the more tiresome duties of Her Majesty’s vice-regal representative is that of playing host to visits from the Prime Minister.   This duty must truly become an irksome burden when the Prime Minister is someone as odious as the current one, Captain Airhead.   Of course, since Captain Airhead is the worst excuse for a human being by far to serve as Prime Minister in the history of Canada, only Simon and her immediate predecessors have had to bear this burden.

 

What her Prime Ministerial supplicant asked for, and obtained, was a dissolution of the Parliament formed in the 2019 Dominion election.   Which means that on the twentieth of September, the next Dominion election will be held.   It is an election that nobody but Captain Airhead himself wants.   All of the other parties have opposed the move.   Erin O’Toole’s Conservatives who were Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition in the last Parliament and, as the only other party to have ever formed a government or with much of a chance of forming one if the Grits are defeated this time around, would logically be the ones to want an election have condemned the move as an irresponsible, egotistical, waste of money, which it is.  Jimmy Dhaliwal’s socialists and the Lower Canadian separatists who have been taking turns propping up the Grit minority government against the Conservative Opposition have no desire to see their hold on the balance of power potentially eviscerated.   As for the Greens, they are too busy imploding as a party due to self-destructive infighting to want to run a campaign right now.   The Canadian public, polled on the subject, has indicated strong opposition to an election being held at this time.

 

That the public would not want an election right now is hardly surprising.   Canadians have historically not been pleased with early elections that follow too closely after the previous one, and since, whatever you and I might think about the bat flu pandemic having been blown out of proportion by the fear pornographers in the mainstream media, the majority of our countrymen seem to take this stercus tauri at face value, and thus would be even less likely to want a very early election this year than on previous occasions.    This makes Captain Airhead’s move a bit of a puzzler.   Ordinarily, Prime Ministers in his position, that is to say, leading a minority government with only a plurality of seats in the House of Commons, try not to risk being punished by an angry electorate by requesting a new election themselves.   Instead, they try to provoke the other parties into voting them down in a no-confidence vote, so that the party that asks for the vote is blamed and punished by the electorate for the dissolution of the previous Parliament.   Captain Airhead clearly thinks that he can take responsibility for the dissolution upon himself and still be awarded a majority by a public that obviously does not want an election.

 

Perhaps Captain Airhead, or Justin Trudeau as some occasionally call him, thinks that he can count on the sycophantic behaviour of the news media which he has enjoyed to an extent that exceeds that of any previous Prime Minister, including his own father at the height of Trudeaumania, to render him exempt from the normal rules.    It is, nevertheless, an extremely hubristic attitude on his part, especially when we consider all the other assumptions implicit within it.

 

In the Dominion election of 2015 the Grits won a solid majority.     This was due to a combination of people being tired with the previous government and the media’s love affair with the Liberal leader whose surface qualities, hiding a total lack of substance, they found appealing.    When a new government receives a majority in its first election, of course, this is not a reward that is has earned and it is expected to earn it after the fact.   When that government is reduced to a plurality in its next election, as Captain Airhead’s Grits were in 2019, this is the judgement of the public that they have failed to subsequently earn their majority.   In this particular example, it was also a rebuke of the Prime Minister’s scandalous behaviour.

 

Towards the end of Captain Airhead’s first term his government’s popularity tanked due to the SNC-Lavalin Affair, a scandal that concerned inappropriate pressure having been placed on the Justice Minister to interfere in the ongoing prosecution of a major corporate backer of the Liberal Party for political reasons.    This was a corruption scandal that pertained to the government’s behaviour in office.   Then, in the actual election campaign, Captain Airhead was hit with a personal scandal as a couple of photographs and a video surfaced, all showing him in blackface.   This is the sort of scandal that would have ended the career of pretty much any other politician in this day and age.   While personally, I think that those who consider skin colour-altering makeup to be inherently “racist” are twits and dingbats who ought to be ignored by sensible people rather than given the influence to police the thoughts and actions of others, Captain Airhead has, since the beginning of his political career, marketed himself as “woke”, that is to say, the sort of numbskull who takes every dictate from the far left’s self-appointed guardians of public mental hygiene vis-à-vis racism very seriously indeed and caters to their every irrational whim.   In other words, exactly the sort of person who ought not to be caught dead in blackface and whose career ought to be especially vulnerable to this sort of scandal.   He had spent an inordinate amount of time in his first term lecturing other Canadians about how we all need to be more “enlightened” and less “racist” like the image he was trying to present of himself.

 

Having survived these scandals has Captain Airhead learned from them and altered his behaviour according?

The evidence would suggest that he has not.

 

Less than a year into his second term, in the early months of the bat flu pandemic, Captain Airhead announced the formation of the Canadian Student Service Grant program that would give students $1000 for every 100 hours of volunteer work they did that summer up to a $5000 maximum.   The WE Charity was picked to administer this program.   This immediately erupted into a corruption scandal that rivalled SNC-Lavalin for the biggest of Captain Airhead’s career.   The WE Charity had been selected without giving other charities the opportunity to bid on the contract.  This charity had a long association with Captain Airhead’s family – his wife had volunteered for the organization which had paid for her travel and other expenses and his mother and brother had both been paid large sums to speak at its events.   Similarly, his then-Finance Minister Bill Morneau had one daughter who worked for the charity, another who spoke at their events, and had himself allowed the charity to pay $41 000 worth of travel expenses for him and his family.   The scandal led to Morneau’s resignation both as Finance Minister and from his seat in the House of Commons.      Captain Airhead, however, remained in office, taking advantage of every opportunity the pandemic afforded him to thwart a proper investigation by Parliament.   A few months ago, the Ethics Commissioner that he had himself had appointed, declared that “Although the connection between Mr. Trudeau’s relatives and WE created the appearance of a conflict of interest, the appearance of conflict is insufficient to cause a contravention to the Act’s substantive views” and pinned all the blame on Morneau.

 

It would seem that the only lesson Captain Airhead took away from the SNC-Lavalin experience is to avoid being held accountable by Parliament.

 

As for the blackface scandal, the very least we have the right to expect from someone who had gone through this sort of humiliation without, astonishingly, it killing his political career would be that he would give lecturing the rest of us about racism a rest.    Anyone foolish enough to actually expect this of Captain Airhead, however, would be very disappointed.   If anything, he has actually gotten much worse in this regards.    Just before the Parliament that has just been dissolved recessed for the summer his Justice Minister introduced Bill C-36, which would amend the Canadian Human Rights Act and the Criminal Code so that left-wing control freaks would no longer have to meet the criminal justice system’s standard of evidence in order to file complaints against people for posting things they, that is the leftists, consider to be racist on the internet and obtain rulings silencing these people and/or imposing crippling fines upon them.   Indeed, unlike the defunct Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act which his father had introduced in 1977 and which was bad enough, Bill C-36, like something out of Philip K. Dick’s “Minority Report”, would allow these leftist censors to peremptorily punish people with peace bonds that effectively strip them of all human dignity for the racist things the leftists are afraid these people might say in the future.     This takes his anti-racist lecturing to the nth degree.   It follows immediately after two summers straight in which far left radical movements that attempt to conceal their true agenda of hatred of the institutions, laws, traditions, and way of life of Western Civilization and racial hatred of people of European descent and light skin colour beneath the innocuous if banal truisms by which they call their movements have made use of deceptively selective media reporting  to stir up race riots and Year Zero Cultural Maoist assaults on historical figures, all of which Captain Airhead has capitalized on by jumping aboard the bandwagon and maximizing his anti-racist posturing.  

 

This is rather much to take coming from the man featured in the blackface scandal of 2019.   It is enough to induce vomiting in even the strongest stomached of sane people, although the same can be said about virtually everything about Captain Airhead from the beginning of his political career. 

 

Captain Airhead apparently thinks that after two years of demonstrating with his behaviour that he has learned absolutely nothing from the scandals that reduced his first majority government to a minority, that he can request an early election and win another majority.   The arrogance of this is truly astounding.

 

It is possible that he thinks that his pandemic record will accomplish his victory.   If so, this merely makes his hubris all the greater.   His handling of the bat flu has been nothing short of abominable.    

 

In the early months of 2020, before the World Health Organization officially declared a pandemic and while there was still a possibility, however slight, of keeping the bat flu virus contained in Wuhan, Captain Airhead and his subordinates branded anybody who suggested that it might be prudent to impose a temporary ban on travel to and from Red China as a racist.   Then in March, the moment the pandemic had been declared he switched gears and began encouraging the provincial governments to impose harsh lockdowns on Canadians based upon the experimental model that Communist China had been using to contain the virus.

 

From the perspective of political strategy there was an almost admirable ingenuity in this.   He could have evoked the Emergencies Act to impose a Dominion-wide lockdown himself.   Instead, he let the provincial governments, mostly led by those whose politics is purportedly the opposite of his, impose the lockdowns and thus incur the resentment of those whose lives were made a living hell by these restrictions which far exceeded anything any free country had ever known before, even in times of war.   Oh, he had a lot of say in it.   The provincial premiers basically gave their provincial chief public health officers free rein, and these in turn acted upon information provided from the Dominion chief public health officer who was appointed to the position by Captain Airhead who threatened to withhold support from the provinces if they veered too much from the lockdown program.   However, apart from the amusing incident when he attempted to play “Mr. Tough Guy” to all the young people who were still having parties and other large social gatherings but merely came across as doing a bad impression of Barbra Streisand and Donna Summer, he allowed the premiers to play the bully – our premier in Manitoba, Brian Pallister excelled in this  - while he put on his Santa Claus suit and started handing out goodies, essentially bribing people to follow the public health orders and stay home.    If he thinks that by doing so he has bought his way back to a majority government then he is assuming that Canadians are too stupid to realize the connection between his spending all of this money at a time when the production of goods and services has been severely limited and the recent spike in the price of food in the grocery stores.  (1)  Sadly, he might be right about that, although there is no reason to believe that he understands the connection himself.

 

At the very beginning of the first lockdown of the pandemic he asked for Parliament to vote him the power to tax and spend without limits or Parliamentary oversight for two years.   Mercifully, this was met with strong opposition from the Conservatives then led by Andrew Scheer and he was denied getting all that he had asked for, although he has since behaved as if he had been given it all.    This request was an outrageous assault on Parliament and the very principles that have been foundational to that venerable institution since the Magna Carta.   There is an interesting if ominous symbolism in the way he introduced the bill within days of the anniversary of the Enabling Act that had been passed by the Reichstag, the legislative assembly of Weimar Germany, which gave emergency powers to the new German chancellor and his cabinet in 1933 and brought about the most hated tyrannical dictatorship in history.

 

This was not the first time nor would it be the last when Captain Airhead demonstrated his utter contempt for Parliament.   Indeed, his entire second term as Prime Minister could be described as one big digitus impudicus in the face of Parliament.   Throughout the pandemic he treated his doorstep with the television cameras on it as if it rather than Parliament were the seat of government in Canada.   He has treated Parliament as if it had no right or authority to hold him and his cabinet accountable.    When the far left radicals began their assault on Canada and her history he made a point of sympathizing with them and reminding them of the colonial origins of Parliament as if to say that government would be so much better if he could just do whatever he wanted without having to answer to that “colonial” institution of Parliament.   When he got frustrated earlier this year with Erin O’Toole for the latter’s doing his job as Leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition and preventing the House from just rubber-stamping his bills as he would have preferred he threw a tantrum, complained of “obstructionism and toxicity” and called Parliament “dysfunctional”.    If there was any dysfunction in Parliament it was due to his own efforts to prevent that body from giving proper deliberation to his legislation proposals and to ram the latter through and not the Opposition’s doing its job.   Around the same time, when the House of Commons ordered the government and the Public Health Agency of Canada to hand over all documents pertaining to the dismissal of two scientists from the high security microbiology lab here in Winnipeg a couple of years previously, he had the amazing gall to launch a Federal Court case against House Speaker Anthony Rota.   On Tuesday of this week the government dropped this lawsuit, but this was because the dissolution of Parliament nullified the order with regards to the documents, and not because the Prime Minister has discovered a newfound respect for Parliament and its rights.

 

In this disrespect for Parliament Captain Airhead demonstrates yet another kind of arrogance, one which has been common to Liberal leaders since at least William Lyon Mackenzie King, but which he has elevated to a whole new level.   In Canada our system of government is that of Queen-in-Parliament.    In this system, which has been tried and proven over long eons of time, political sovereignty is vested in the office of the reigning monarch.    This office is filled, not by popular election nor by appointment by the rich and powerful, but by hereditary succession.   Therefore, since the monarch owes her office neither to a political faction nor to special interest groups, she can reign as a non-political figure in the way no elected head of state ever could.   The powers of government, principally those to legislate, tax, and spend, are exercised in the name of the Queen and those who exercise them are accountable to the representatives elected by the people who pay the taxes and are expected to obey the laws, which representatives meet in the lower House of Parliament.   Therefore in this system, when it is functioning properly, the Prime Minister and Cabinet are dually accountable both to the reigning monarch above, and to Parliament below.    The world has never known a better system of government than this one when it is allowed to function without subversion.   Liberal leaders from Mackenzie King down and especially Captain Airhead have shown a decided preference for subverting this system.   They seldom object to retaining its outward form, unlike the idiot who currently leads the socialist party, but they do not want to govern under its restraints and so seek to subvert them whenever they can.   Their preference is that in practice the Prime Minister and Cabinet rule through the bureaucracy that they control and are only ever held accountable at election time, at least when their party is in government.

 

If most Canadians had a proper appreciation for our traditional system of government most of the Liberal Prime Ministers of the last hundred years would have been unelectable.   This would be all the more true of Captain Airhead, who exceeds all of the rest of them combined in his autocratic arrogance, making even his own father look humble in comparison.

 

(1)   Wealth is generated by people producing goods and services that they and others want and consists of those goods and services.  Money is the medium that allows these goods and services to be exchanged more conveniently than by direct barter and which allows accumulated wealth to be stored for later use.   The value of money goes up when the amount of money remains the same but the production of goods and services increases, and goes down when more money is put into circulation while the production of goods and services remains the same.    When the amount of money increases relative to that of goods and services this is called inflation which is most noticeable when it manifests itself in the rise of the price of consumer goods.   Whenever the government starts handing out large amounts of money, whether it just runs more currency off on the printing press or borrows from some financial institution – in the age of electronic currency the distinction between these ways of doing it has been blurred to the point where it may no longer be meaningful – the amount of money relative to goods and services increases.   When, at the same time, the government puts a stop to the production of “non-essential” goods and services, that is to say, the goods and services that in terms of real wealth actually pay for the production of “essential” goods and services, this is a recipe for massive and devastating inflation.

 

GTN Tory Classics No. 5: Basic Economics

The essay that follows was originally the third in a seven part series beginning with “The Economic Age” and ending with “The Free Trade Cult”. The introductory essay to that series was the last essay I re-posted here in my “Tory Classics” series. I wrote that essay as an introduction to the economics series because I wanted to start by placing economics in perspective by arguing that economics is not the most important thing in the world. The following essay is a more typical introduction to the topic of economics and deals with such basics as production, distribution, and consumption.

Towards the end of this essay I argue that production is more important than distribution or consumption because without production there would be nothing to distribute or consume. This is the most important point in the essay. Many are the free market economists who seem to understand everything else about economics except this point.

Basic Economics


By Gerry T. Neal
June 4, 2009

Every country’s economy has three basic parts: production, distribution, and consumption. Production refers to the creation of material wealth and consists of agriculture and manufacturing. Consumption is the use of the material wealth created in production. Distribution is how material wealth gets from the producer to the consumer.

Material wealth is not the same thing as money. Material wealth includes land and buildings, food and clothing, and other goods that people need or want. Money is just one good out of many and its primary function is to simplify the exchange of other kinds of goods.

Goods which are used to produce other goods are called “capital goods” or just “capital”.

Some people believe that the best and fairest economy is one in which capital goods are owned collectively by the public with distribution being in the hands of the state. These people are called socialists. Others believe that capital goods do not have to be publicly owned but that the system – production, distribution, and consumption – entirely or in part, should be under strict government regulation.

These people have been proven wrong time and again. So much so that they should be embarrassed to express their views in public.

What happens when production is controlled by the state? We need look no further than the late USSR and Red China during the days of Mao to find our answer to that. The state proved incompetent in the production of even the simplest of goods and massive poverty, starvation, and misery was the result.

Without state control of production, there can only ever be partial state control of distribution and consumption. This control takes the form of the state confiscating wealth from the private sector through taxation and handing it over to other people.

Some people believe this is the compassionate thing to do. They are mistaken. Only people can be compassionate, not governments. If you are genuinely compassionate you will express that by helping the poor out of your own wealth. To support with your words and votes, a policy in which the state helps the poor from money it takes from people other than yourself, is not a genuine form of compassion. It is, in fact, a way of avoiding being compassionate, by placing the responsibility for helping the poor onto the shoulders of the state and the taxpaying public instead of bearing it yourself.

The government social programs that make up what is called “the welfare state” were sold to voters as initiatives that would eliminate poverty and bring about a general prosperity. Have they done so? Far from it. Instead they created a permanent and growing, privileged, underclass. They created tensions that threaten to rip the social fabric into pieces by fostering a sense of frustrated entitlement in the poor and a sense of resentment in the middle class which is forced to bear most of the tax burden for the upkeep of the poor.

The idea that the production, distribution, and consumption of material wealth should be planned and controlled by the state is simply wrong. It has never worked in the past, it is not working in the present, why would we be so foolish as to think maybe it will work in the future.

No, the production, distribution, and consumption of material wealth are best left in the hands of private property owners, who buy and sell the goods they produce and the services they offer, in a free market.

A market is a situation (not necessarily a place) in which someone trades something they own for something someone else owns. A “free” market is a market where buyer and seller are allowed to come to their own terms as to the exchange. Let us say a dairy farmer goes to the market to sell his milk and his neighbor who keeps chickens goes to the market to sell his eggs. The dairy farmer needs eggs and the chicken keeper needs milk. The dairy farmer is willing to trade a liter of milk for a dozen eggs and the chicken keeper is willing to make this exchange and so they do so. The price they have decided upon is fair and just. What the dairy farmer is willing to accept in exchange for his milk is based on his own calculations of his own needs, and what the chicken keeper is willing to accept in exchange for his eggs is based on his own calculations of his own needs. No set of government experts anywhere would be better qualified to judge these matters than the farmers involved.

If government experts are not competent to come up with a better price for a single exchange than the participants, they are much less competent to set prices for everybody in the country. Their attempts to do so only cause harm.

When the government says “You cannot buy labour for less than so-many dollars an hour” this is not benefiting workers. No one’s work becomes more valuable because the minimum wage rises. All this does is eliminate jobs that are not worth paying someone minimum wage for. The jobs thus eliminated, are generally the jobs that would otherwise be taken by people entering the workforce, trying to get the experience that better paying jobs require. Everyone who ever got frustrated because all available jobs required experience which could not be obtained without getting a job can thank the government – and the bleeding hearts and the unions which demanded minimum wage laws from the government – for it.

Most market transactions do not consist of the direct barter of goods like eggs and milk. The eggs and milk are both sold for money instead. Money is the medium of exchange in an economy and as such it is the single most valuable commodity. Historically, precious metals like gold and silver have made the best moneys. We no longer use them for money today because governments prefer a paper (or electronic) currency that they can control. By controlling the money supply, they are able to devalue it through inflation (increasing the money supply). This allows the government to confiscate the country’s wealth without raising taxes because they get to spend the new money at the old value of money, before the increase in the money supply causes money’s value to drop relative to other goods in the market.

This discourages saving because if your money is going to be worth less in the future than it is today it makes more sense to spend it now than to save it. Saving is important, however, if a person or a country wishes to become wealthy – or even financially independent. Inflation is the path to national poverty.

We don’t notice inflation as much if consumer prices are not rising. If the production of consumer goods has increased the inflation will keep the prices of those goods from dropping rather than causing it to rise. Thus governments have encouraged manufacturing companies to step up production by outsourcing to countries where it can be done cheaper, causing consumer prices to remain relatively stable while they drain the country’s wealth through inflation.

But what happens when a country increases consumption and allows others to do its production?

Production is more important than distribution and consumption (and agricultural production, which produces necessities is more important than manufacturing which produces luxury items). Production creates wealth which is distributed through the market. Without production there would be nothing to distribute. Consumption uses wealth up. Consumption without production leads to poverty.

Those who think that outsourcing their country’s productive capacity will lead to prosperity because it brings consumer prices down would do well to consider that.

A sound national economy requires production on the part of private property owners, who sell their goods in a free market, and a stable money supply that keeps its value thus encouraging people to save.