VIDEO: Attn Americans: Canada's housing hell

I always LMAO when I hear Hollywood celebs like Cher, Barbra Streisand and Robber Reiner threaten to move to Canada when -- notice, "when", not "if" -- President Trump is re-elected. I'd like to see them try it!

Suppose one of them has a house valued at a million dollars in Malibu and is tired of having illegal alien migrants sleep and shitting on the beach in front of them. Xe has a house worth a million dollars. That should be about 1.35 million beaverbucks, right? That should get you a decent house in Canada, right? Wrong! That's about the average price of a modest single-family house in Toronto, such as this.

I'm exaggerating a bit. You wouldn't get that much land with the bungalow in Toronto. Maybe out in Dundalk ON, but not in Toronto, where 30-foot lots are the norm and "laneway houses" are starting to appear. Yeah, you might get a laneway house for $1,000,000.

The fact is, as Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre explains in this video, that affordable housing is beyond the reach of the vast majority of the subjects of Justin Trudeau, Emperor of All Canuckistan. Young Canucks starting out today have abandoned all hope of ever owning a house, and a great many can't even afford to rent, so they wind up couch-surfing or living with mom and dad. Canada really is "housing hell".

  

 

Tom Mulcair, the former leader of Canada's socialist NDP, now a talking head for the liberal CTV network, calls this video "just about the best piece of political communication Canadians have ever been treated to, and...devastating for Trudeau." 

As I explained in yesterday's post, it may be years yet before hapless Canucks get the chance to turf out the master narcissist. But our American readers are less than year away from their opportunity to give the boot to Demented Joe Biden, whose "Bidenomics" are having the same effect on the US of A. If you don't believe me, just take a walk (if you dare) around any American city. You won't have to go far to see "homeless encampments" -- remember "Hoovervilles"? -- even worse than than those in Trudeau's Canada.

Both the USA and Canada are broken. The lot of the average Canadian or American is worse than at any time since the Great Depression. The blame lies squarely at the doors of the liberal governments of Corrupt Joe Brandon and Blackie McBlackface. Resist them in any and every way you can!

Further viewing: "Advice on moving to Canada (if Trump wins)", VIDEO by Gavin McInnes, WWW 27/4/16. Poor Len Canayen and Walt himself approve Gavin's toque!

Wisdom for today from legal decisions of the Dirty Thirties

Americans and Canadians are going through hard times. The slowdown of business and other activity caused by the Wuhan flu pandemic sent our economies into a tailspin, from which we have not yet recovered, no matter what President Brandon and Prime Minister McBlackface tell you. Not only have we not recovered, but we are teetering on the brink of recession. 

More people are working than was the case two years ago, but more people are not working, too. Some folks, having discovered that our liberal governments will pay them not to work, have simply dropped out of the work force. Thus the same liberal governments are now telling us we need to import hundreds of thousands of third-world migrants to meet "staffing challenges".

Bidenflation has pushed prices up to the point where a lot "working poor" can barely afford to drive to work. The federal governments of both countries desperately need more revenue to cover the deficits they incur by shovelling money out to the special interest groups they rely on to keep them in power. But they are afraid to raise taxes, so the liberal cry today is "Make the rich pay their share...and more!"

And there is civil unrest, notably in Canada where Mr Socks invoked the Emergencies Act (aka Police State Act, aka Son of War Measures Act) to quash last winter's Freedom Convoy by, among other draconian measures, freezing dissenters' bank accounts without notice! That'll teach them to cling to their "unacceptable views"!

The United States went through a similar bad patch during the Great Recession of the 1930s. The Presidents of those days were mile aheads of both Demented Joe and the Emperor of Canuckistan in arrogating to their governments unprecedented powers of taxation and repression of dissent. 

Walt wonders if M Trudeau's handlers studied President Herbert Hoover's response to the 1932 march on Washington of the Bonus Army -- 1000s of war veterans demanding the bonuses which they had been promised at the end of WWI, which had never been paid. This is how it went down.

On 28 July 1932, Attorney General William D. Mitchell ordered the "Bonus Expeditionary Force" removed from all government property. Washington police met with resistance, shot at the protestors. Two veterans were wounded and later died. President Herbert Hoover then ordered the U.S. Army to clear the marchers' campsite. Army Chief of Staff General Douglas MacArthur commanded a contingent of infantry and cavalry, supported by six tanks. The Bonus Army marchers with their wives and children were driven out, and their shelters and belongings burned.

Such heavy-handed tactics became the norm under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who used whatever means he could to force Americans -- particularly rich Americans and their businesses, large and small -- to submit to his New Deal. Those who dissented had the G-men sicced on them. After all, Roosevelt declaimed, this is an emergency!

One business which FDR's Treasury Dept. tried to coerce was a firm owned by three Jewish brothers who butchered chickens. They balked at Roosevelt's National Industrial Recovery Act, which allowed the President to regulate certain industries by distributing authority to develop codes of conduct among business groups and boards in those industries -- i.e.to control private businesses. The Schecters fought the feds all the way to the Supreme Court, which ruled in their favour. (A.L.A. Schecter Poultry Corp. v. United States, 295 U.S. 495 (1935)) 

In an opinion authored by Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes, the unanimous Court exercised a check on the Legislative and Executive branches of government, declaring the Act and actions of the President an unconstitutional delegation of legislative authority. 

SCOTUS ruled that the President cannot be allowed to have unbridled control to make whatever laws he believes to be necessary to achieve a certain goal. Justice Hughes wrote: "Extraordinary conditions may call for extraordinary remedies. But the argument necessarily stops short of an attempt to justify action which lies outside the sphere of constitutional authority. Extraordinary conditions do not create or enlarge constitutional powers." 

Here's another piece of wisdom from a famous judge, which may give some comfort to President Trump as he fights to avoid a too-public audit of his tax returns. In Helvering v. Gregory, 293 U.S. 465 (1935).69 F.2d 809 (2d Cir. 1934), Judge Billings Learned Hand, of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, ruled that: "Anyone may so arrange his affairs that his taxes shall be as low as possible. Everybody does so, rich or poor; and all do right for nobody owes any public duty to pay more than the law demands.... To demand more in the name of morals is mere cant."

The emphasis is mine. For some 65 years, beginning with the Court of Chief Justice Earl Warren too long (1953-1969), the Supreme Court was dominated by judicial activists intent on rewriting the laws of the USA, including the Constitution itself, to bring about "social justice" and equality of result, as opposed to the equality of opportunity which was the aim of the founding fathers. That is still the mindset of the Supreme Court of Canada.

However, the times they are a-changin'. Ordinary people, real people on both sides of the World's Longest Open Border are waking up to the fact that the liberal democratic state of Roosevelt-Johnson-Clinton-Biden and King-Pearson-Trudeau (Senior and Junior) is not their friend, but their enemy. Walt says: be like the Schecter brothers -- fight back! You can fight and beat city hall!

Recession? What recession?

At school, I studied "Polisciandec" (Political Science and Economics). Political science was interesting. Economics, not so much. They don't call it "the dismal science" for nothing! Q. Why does God allow economists to live? A. To make astrologers look good by comparison! 

My point (and I do have one) is that political science and economics are inextricably intertwined. You can't do one without the other. Bad policies inevitably have bad economic consequences. This is a lesson which President Brandon and Prime Minister McBlackface seem not to have learned. Maybe they weren't in class that day. I commend to them, and to you, dear reader, The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression, by Amity Shlaes, HarperCollins 2007.

Our so-called leaders (and you) don't need to read the whole book. The introduction will do. It includes a quote from an 1883 essay called "The Forgotten Man", by William Graham Sumner, an American social scientist and classical liberal. To wit: 

As soon as A observes something, which seems to him to be wrong, from which X is suffering, A talks it over with B, and A and B then propose to get a law passed to remedy the evil and help X. Their law always proposes to determine...what C shall do for X, or in the better case, what A, B, and C shall do for X.... 

I call [C] the Forgotten Man. Perhaps the appellation is not strictly correct. He is the man who never is thought of.... He works, he votes, generally he prays -- but he always pays.... 

There is nothing wrong (Ms Shlaes speaking now) with A and B helping X. What was wrong was the law, and the indenturing of C to the cause. Whereas C had been Sumner's forgotten man, [Roosevelt's] New Deal made X the forgotten man -- the poor man, the old man, labor, or any other recipient of government help. 

Roosevelt's work on behalf of his version of the forgotten man generated a new tradition. To justify giving to one forgotten man, the administration found, it had to make a scapegoat of another. Businessmen and businesses were the targets.... 

[During the Great Depression] C [became] the American who was not thought of. He was the Depression-era man who was not part of any political constituency and therefore lived the negatives of the period. 

He was the man who paid for the big projects, who got make-work instead of real work. He was the man who waited for economic growth that did not come.

As an editorialist in Indiana wrote in 1936, "Who is the 'forgotten man' in Muncie? I know him as intimately as I know my own undershirt. He is the fellow that is trying to get along without public relief and has been attempting the same thing since the depression that cracked down on him."

Roosevelt systematized interest-group politics...to include many constituencies.... [He] ministered to those groups, and was rewarded with votes. It can be argued that [he] created the modern entitlement challenge that so bedevils both parties.

[Roosevelt adopted] Keynesianism, named after John Maynard Keynes, [which] emphasized consumers, who were also voters. The theory gave license for perpetual experimentation. [It] also emphasized government spending. Yet focusing on consumers meant that Washington neglected the producer. Focusing on the fun of experiments neglected the question of whether unceasing experimentation might frighten business into terrified inaction.

Admiring the short-term action of spending drew attention away from its longer-term limits -- economies often go into recession when the spending disappears. 

Thus endeth the lesson. If you understand and agree with Ms Shlaes' analysis, you might bring it to the attention of your Congressperson or Member of Parliament. Chances are they won't "geddit", or, even if they do, won't dare -- if they are Democrats or Liberals -- to challenge their political masters. But when they finally admit that our economy is in recession, you'll be able to say "I told you so."