With one action, in one week, the whole world will boom.
I am sharply aware that the upper middle class, the people I grew up among, studied and worked with do not give a damn about the less fortunate. They can’t. They don’t have agency, they have effectively cancelled themselves, despairing in private that they can’t do anything. They pay their significant taxes and hope. They don’t even check that the things they pay for are being fixed. Which they are clearly not. Despite trillions to the less fortunate, crime has risen 35% in major cities, the trafficking of children increases, people in the developing world surge at the borders. The culture coarsens by the second, over half of high school graduates can’t write or calculate. College students are stupefied by anger, resentment and moronic ideas.
The financial markets are looking more dangerous than 2008. For the bottom 50%, the winter will be disastrous. In the developing world, mass starvation beckons.
But the well-off are all right. Their children are all right. Their jobs are secure. If confronted by reality by accident, they grit their teeth, feel powerless for a moment or two, then move onto the ever-so-busy schedule. Caring is beyond them.
From Zero Hedge this morning:
Anti-globalism is now going mainstream, and as it does people are going to start looking for answers. Why have our economic conditions been so degraded? Why are we facing stagflationary crisis? Why are prices on everything continuing to climb? Why did we almost lose all of our civil liberties in the name of fighting a virus with a tiny 0.23% official median Infection Fatality Rate? Why are pointless carbon controls being instituted in the middle of a supply chain crisis? Why are politicians and banks making everything so much worse?
Market signals, are all over the place. When market signals are not clear, money does not go to a productive place. Money’s virtue is in creating more money. But that has not been the case for the past 15 years. It has gone where it can make the most, and where it has gone has been entirely destructive of both culture and economy. Subsidies to green, subsidies to Big Pharma for the shots, subsidies to everyone for Covid, all entirely unnecessary. Men like Jerome Powell made their $50 million by piling all private American corporations with debt they can’t pay down. CDOs are as dangerous as the mortgage bonds of ‘08. This debt now has vertiginous interest rates attached to it.
The US is $30,000,000,000, in debt. The interest rates on that debt are no longer ZIRP.
Every time they print more money the interest rates go up on everyone’s debt. With no end in sight. There is no end in sight. Energy prices, unless they are price fixed – which leads to 30% interest rates – will rocket 400% this winter with the destruction of Nordstream.
We are in the third quarter of a contraction with no end in sight. The S&P is down 23%. Credit card debt is up 18%. The consumer has lost $9 trillion in value in the last 8 months.
Every private corporation, every government at every level is carrying insane levels of pension obligations, all in the market, except those which are unfunded, mostly municipal.
The smartest people on Wall Street are saying we don’t have true market valuations yet. All metrics have to come down: sales, margins and multiples. Retail dropped 4% in one day last week.
“Don’t buy the dip,” they say. It’s not a bottom yet. “Think of the future as return OF capital, not return ON capital.”
Nine trillion in personal household loss since January, and it’s not over.
In late September, we almost had a Lehman Bros. type-crash averted by the Bank of England. The UK exchange couldn’t make margin calls. The Brits averted this by borrowing on the future of their great grandchildren.
Their only solution is crash the economy, impoverish everyone they can. Starve people. Freeze them. Ruin futures.
All unnecessary. Completely and utterly unnecessary. All this pain, the old people that will freeze this winter, families losing everything. All of it is completely unnecessary. It has all been created by government.
Instead, we could be in a sustained economic boom that should go on for 100 years. There is so much under-utilized capacity in both resources and human labour. In Africa according to Magette Wade, their biggest/only problem is bureaucracy. Fixed, Africa would boom with 15% growth rates for 20 years.
Malignant government policy created this mess, and almost all of it has been created by the environmental movement. Everywhere, and I mean everywhere in the world, production and growth are stopped or reversed by the Iron Triangle of the environmental movement: bureaucrat, environmental NGOs funded by the super rich, and legislators.
It took forty years to destroy the global economy. One bad idea, that humans are a pollutant, is destroying the world.
Humans fix the world, not destroy it. As soon as incomes reach past subsistence, humans heal, not destroy.
For the past thirty years, bureaucrats and NGO’s have tied the base economy in tens of thousands of regulations that stopped the use of our natural resources. We moved all natural resource extraction to Russia, and all manufacturing to Asia by loading regulation on every single business in the US and Canada. Unless you are a micro-business, no one can make anything, because if you do, you will have ten thousand regulatory requirements before you can open a door.
A mine? $100 million before you get a shovel into the dirt.
A ski resort? 20 years and $50 million dollars and at the whim of a green judge, that money vanishes.
A farm? A ranch? A cut block? Everything is opposed. No one can do anything. I live in the warmest, most beautiful part of Canada, on a pastoral island. We could be an economic engine for the entire region, creating money and jobs and ideas and solutions, but we live as if in Soviet Russia, marooned in quiescence.
In contrast, everywhere people control their own property and lands, prosperity for all grows and grows:
Every assumption the environmental business has forced upon us is false. Utterly false.
Massive untapped potential lies in every village, town, city and country in the world. In every town, in every county in North America. For a few brief years, under Donald Trump, America’s energy production boomed and so did the economy.
The answer is right under our feet1. Full spectrum energy dominance. Deregulation – 2 regulations eliminated for every new one.
Chop 30% of every bureaucracy and within weeks, weeks, the whole world booms.
Elizabeth Nickson is a senior fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy. Follow her on Substack here.
Additional reading:
Surviving Sustainability Deconstructing the Myths and Mapping Post-Scarcity by Elizabeth Nickson, Frontier Centre Policy Series 134, October 2014
Policy Proposals for Future Leaders to Help Make the Canadian Economy Soar by Ian Madsen and Peter Holle, Frontier Centre Policy Series 163, September 2022
