Showing posts with label NAFTA. Show all posts
Showing posts with label NAFTA. Show all posts

Wednesday, April 4, 2018

Canadian Economics: Lies by the Government Paid for by the Public

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) is an agency for the deception of the public at public expense. Almost any snatch of a CBC news broadcast or public policy discussion will, on examination, be found to encapsulate a lie.

A meme currently being foisted on the public by the CBC is that trade protectionism hurts the public by raising prices. The inference being that higher prices due to trade protectionism hurt every Canadian.

That is the lie.

The purpose of trade protectionism is to raise wages of people who will produce the goods that would otherwise be imported from collapsible factories in Bangladesh, Chinese electronics assembly plants with anti-suicide nets, etc. So yes, tariffs raise prices but they also raise incomes of working people. So trade protectionism makes many working people better off at the expense mainly of those in the FIRE and globalized sectors of the economy. Protectionism would also allow Canada to rebuild some of its battered manufacturing sector that was undermined by NAFTA and devastated by free trade with the sweat-shop economies.

Yes protectionism results in retaliatory measures, but what do low-wage economies buy from Canada? Not much. Seventy-seven point four percent of Canadian exports go to the US and Mexico which are largely free of protectionist tariffs against Canadian goods. The rest consists in those incredibly cheap  shoes and shirts, and omputers and car parts that Canadians used to make for one another but now buy in large quantities from exploiters of sweated Asian labor.

In fact, a protected US Market to which Canadians have free access by virtue of the NAFTA agreement would provide huge opportunities for Canadian manufacturing.


Friday, February 10, 2017

Nation-Destroying Stupidity In the Age of Universal Higher Education

English novelist, wartime spy, journalist, editor, humorist, novelist, and TV personality, the late Malcolm Muggeridge, once remarked that when everyone has a university degree, no one will know anything at all.

We are now approaching the time when the truth of that prediction can be tested. Two-thirds of Canadians between the ages of 25 and 64 now have a post-secondary education. Since the proportion of those benefiting from higher ed continues to rise, it follows that the vast majority of younger Canadian adults have, or will obtain, a university degree or some other kind of post-secondary diploma.

Thursday, November 10, 2016

Why Justin Trudeau Is Ready to Renegotiate NAFTA

"If the Americans want to talk about NAFTA, I’m more than happy to talk about it." So said Canada' Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, thus proving that Canada's current Prime Minister is a very sensible pragmatist. 

Canada, like the US, has lost a large number of jobs in both manufacturing and services to Third World jurisdictions such as Mexico, where people are happy to take the job of a Canadian for the payment of mere pennies an hour.