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“Price Gouging” vs. Hoarding: Why Premier Doug Ford Owes Pusateri’s An Apology

March 26, 2020 by · Comments Off on “Price Gouging” vs. Hoarding: Why Premier Doug Ford Owes Pusateri’s An Apology 

Pusateri’s is a Toronto retailer that is being attacked on social media for reportedly charging $30 for one package of Lysol disinfectant wipes. Critics of the decision to set that price call it an instance of “price gouging” – i.e., charging more than the usual price during a time of usual-supply and unusually-high demand – and condemn it morally. Asked to weigh-in on what Pusateri’s was doing, Ontario Premier Doug Ford was “furious”, exclaimed that the pricing was “absolutely disgusting”, and advised that his government was “gonna come after [“price gougers”] hard” using emergency powers he has given himself in response to the spread of the Coronavirus. “They’re done! They’re gonna be gone!”, he exclaimed, referring to Pusateri’s as a “bad actor”. He, and the self-righteous anti-“price gouging” scolds, should have been thanking Pusateri’s for performing an essential function. Read more

Right to work laws: a leftist assault on capitalism

September 26, 2013 by · 1 Comment 

Tim Hudak, leader of the Progressive Conservative official opposition in Ontario, is pinning his electoral hopes on a proposal to introduce “right to work” legislation: a law that makes it illegal to make employment conditional on the employee’s membership in a union. Union talking heads – especially Ontario Federation of Labour chief Sid Ryan – as well as many in the media refer to right to work laws as an instance of “union bashing” or “union busting”. What almost never gets mentioned is that right to work laws also bash employers. Far from being a capitalist tool, right to work laws are just another leftist assault on capitalism. Read more

Canada to fund tribute to communism?

August 23, 2013 by · Leave a Comment 

Imagine a golden memorial to the victims of concentration camps being built buy those who ran the camps, and made by melting down the gold teeth of the victims. Such a memorial would not be possible but for the theft, imprisonment and murder involved in its creation. Such a grotesque and pain-invoking memorial would, in fact, stand not for the wrongfulness of letting people starve in concentration camps, but for the fact that the oppressors got away with their evil deeds. If you share my view of this, I can only hope you regard today’s news as being a stunning example of the same sort of perversion (though less graphic): today, the federal government of Canada announced that up to $1.5M taxpayer dollars will be given to a private group astonishingly titled “Tribute to Liberty”, so that it can erect a “Memorial to Victims of Totalitarian Communism” on crown land near the Supreme Court of Canada. Read more

Implementing Drummond Report A Mistake

February 21, 2012 by · Leave a Comment 

The long-awaited 2012 report of the Commission on the Reform of Ontario’s Public Services (a.k.a. the “Drummond Report”) has been delivered. Ontario’s official opposition, and almost all journalists, are speaking about the report as though it is tough medicine that now must be swallowed if Ontario’s budget is to be balanced in 2017-18. Though the report does finally put to rest the nonsense – nonsense spouted by both Liberals and Progressive Conservatives until now – that Ontario is on course for a balanced budget in 2017-18, the report is not medicine at all. Ontario’s budget cannot be balanced by 2017-18 or any other year by attempting to implement the Drummond Report’s 362 recommendations, even could they all be deciphered and concretized. Consequently, all of the arguments you will hear among PC, Liberal, and NDP MPPs over the coming months – about how and how quickly the report should be implemented, and to what extent – will serve only to ensure that the action needed to solve Ontario’s fiscal woes never gets discussed. Read more

Freedom Party's Job Creation Plan

September 10, 2011 by · 4 Comments 

I was recently asked: “What is the Freedom Party’s plan for creating jobs?” It’s a question commonly asked of all parties. What follows is one of my answers.

The truth of the matter is that government is an organization that does not create wealth. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing: the same is true of all law enforcement, including the military, the judiciary, etc.. My point is that none of those organizations performs the role of creating wealth. A government primarily stops people from doing things…preferably, only from doing bad things. Specifically, a government, when it is doing its job well, prevents anyone from taking your life, your liberty, or your property without your consent.

In truth, government is capable only of decreasing the number of jobs that people create: it is capable of job destruction. Government can destroy jobs in either of two ways: using its influence when it shouldn’t, or failing to use its influence when it should. In other words: governmental errors and omissions destroy jobs. Read more

Laying Blame for the Economic Mess: Milton Keynes or John Maynard Friedman?

September 11, 2009 by · 1 Comment 

2009.09.11.jmfriedmanOn September 2, 2009, the Financial Post published an opinion piece by Penn Bullock that asks whether or not the current economic crisis was the result of Milton Friedman’s monetarism. Casting him rightly as someone held up as a hero by libertarians, Bullock concludes:

For two libertarian champions of free markets and limited government, this legacy has the ring of a world-historic irony.

In response, I submitted the following letter to the editor of the Financial Post. From what I can tell, it was not published by that paper. Read more

The Interest Myth Exploded

May 18, 2009 by · 19 Comments 

I recently received a question from a reader concerning my post of October 20, 2008, entitled “Banking and Morality: 100% Reserve versus “Fractional” Reserves“. It reads as follows: Read more

Beer, Gas & Leviathan

September 19, 2008 by · Leave a Comment 

My September 13th article and video “Canada’s 2008 Election: Green? Shift?” led one of my FaceBook friends, Alex, to make the following comment: Read more

Teacher's Pay: Merit versus Market

September 4, 2008 by · 6 Comments 

The National Post published an editorial today reporting that: Read more

Atlas Shrugged, Freedom, and the Reincarnation of Whitaker Chambers

August 2, 2008 by · 6 Comments 

In an article titled “On Libertarian Bolshevism”, conservative blogger Adam T. Yoshida argues that we see two approaches being proposed to achieve a free society that not only are doomed to fail, but also make it more difficult for a “Reactionary Libertarian” to achieve a freer society. Yoshida implies that the Reactionary Libertarian has an approach that can achieve freedom in a society that is either indifferent to, or hostile to, the goal of a free society: “going back to some older social structures and institutions”. Read more

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