Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Category: Economics Page 1 of 89

End Of Empire: Effects & Theory Of Trump’s Tariffs

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On February 3, 2025

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Let’s deal with the big, almost certain effects first.

This is the beginning of the end of  the American alliance system, empire and world economic system.

Trump is planning on putting tariffs on Europe, too. He put higher tariffs on Canada, supposedly one of America’s closest allies, than on China. Hitting the majority of America’s vassals/allies all at more or less the same time, with them retaliating with their own tariffs means an end to the American created world economic system. It will also lead to the end of NATO and, in time, other alliances. Europe’s mainland isn’t practically subject to threat of invasion from the US the way that Canada and Mexico are, they don’t have to put up with this, but threats to Greenland make it clear that the US is more likely to invade an actual EU member than Russia is.

Hard to have an alliance with a nation you’re in a trade war with who is threatening to invade one of your countries and who, by all accounts, is serious about it.

And while the tariffs are all justified on “national security” which is “letter” legal, everyone knows that’s bullshit. Trump is violating the purpose of the WTO, USMCA/NAFTA and other trade treaties the US has signed.

There’s no way the world trade order survives this and no way the American empire does either, since it’s based on an alliance system and bases around the world, many of which are in countries Trump is declaring his trade war on. Even countries who escape tariffs for now can’t feel secure. Ironically it’s the tariffs on Canada which will do the US the most international harm: everyone knows that Canada has been a completely supine vassal giving to the US everything it wants. Canadian exports, minus oil and gas, are less than its imports from the US, so there’s no legitimate re-balancing argument, even. Foreign leaders have read reports making this clear.

Alright, enough about the top-line effects. Let’s look into the theory of tariffs Trump appears to believe.

Trump has nominated Stephen Miran American to be chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers. Stephen is a senior strategist for Hudson Bay Capital management, and he wrote a 40 page brief, primarily on tariffs, called “A User’s Guide to Restructuring the Global Trading System.“

The most important part of his thesis is the following argument about the effect of tariffs.

1) The currency of the exporter will depreciate to make up the difference in cost.

2) Consumer prices will not go up, therefore;

3) the exporting country is damaged, the importing tariffing country is not.

4) But the tariffing country does get revenue! Free lunch, in other words.

5) Importer profit margins take any hits hits not covered by the exporter’s currency depreciation, not prices, or at least they did last time.

This argument is given empirical backing by looking at what happened when Trump imposed tariffs during his first term: the Yuan depreciated and consumer prices didn’t rise.

Let’s run thru this.

  • China tends to control the price of its currency. If the Yuan depreciated, it’s because the Chinese government chose to depreciate it. They may not choose to do so this time.
  • America has no option but to buy from China. From machine goods to basic electronics to parts for America’s defense industry, there are no domestic or European alternatives for much of it.
  • China doesn’t, therefore, have to depreciate its currency. It might sell less goods, but it will still sell tons. It’s a political decision.
  • If the exchange rate does drop, or balance, which is not a sure thing, even with non-controlled currencies, then US exports to that country become more expensive, and the exports to that country drop. In the case of Canada, which imports more goods from the US than vice-versa, what is likely to happen is import substitution: Canadian importers will probably switch to China.
  • In fact, this will be a general issue. Any country the US puts tariffs on will replace a lot of imported US goods with Chinese goods.
  • Not all importers can eat the losses. The reason Trump put only 10% tariffs on oil and gas is that American refiners have thin profit margins. Any increase in crude prices from tariffs will be passed on to consumers. (Aside: this is clearly the Achilles heel and Canada should put an exit-tariff on crude to hurt the US as much as possible.)
  • Importers also don’t have to eat the price increases. In the pre-Covid world, there was a lot less consumer inflation. But when Covid happened, prices increased faster than costs because Covid supply shocks were a good excuse to raise prices. Some importers may eat the increased costs, others may pass them on, and even raise prices more than the tariffs. If they have pricing power, if people must buy from them, then why not? Fear of Trump might cause some to eat the difference, but there are a lot of obscure, little importers. Apple passing on costs or gouging will be noticed so they’ll probably eat it. Others won’t.
  • The money the government receives comes from Americans, really, not foreigners. They pay the tariffs. There are elites who are going to be hurt by Trump’s tariffs.

What Miran doesn’t talk much about is the idea of import substitution. The real reason to do tariffs is to protect and nurture internal producers. This is important to Trump, he’s talked about it often.

With respect to Mexico, the idea is to get factories in Mexico to move to the US. They exist in Mexico primarily because Mexico used to have tariff free access to America, and has lower costs than America. There will be some effect here. The calculus will mostly be about uncertainty, though, not costs. In most cases producing in Mexico is probably still cheaper, even after a 25% tariff, than producing in America. But given how erratic Trump is, and that he’s indicated there may be more and higher tariffs, it may make sense to move factories to the US. The US won’t tariff itself.

But this is more complicated than it looks, because the US doesn’t make most of the parts any factory will need, so those have to be imported, and tariffed, or a supply network needs to be built in the US.

That’s what the US wants. If you want sell to us, you have to make it here, not just assemble it.

This is fair enough, actually, but it’s based on an assumption of continued dollar privilege.

Take a look at this chart:

The US is able to run these long term, consistent trade deficits because of dollar privilege. It can print dollars and everyone will take them.

But if the US world economic system is breaking up, if NATO is likely to die, and if the US is tariffing its allies, will dollar privilege survive? After all, you don’t really need dollars to buy from the US, because the vast majority of what you buy from the US you could buy from China instead, and Chinese prices are cheaper. If America doesn’t want you to export to them, well, what good are the dollars?

This is why Trump has been making horrific threats to BRICS about replacing the dollar. BRICS has reassured them it doesn’t intend to do that, but it’s not clear they aren’t lying and in any case, what BRICS has mostly been doing is changing from using the US dollar in trade to just using bilateral currencies. More and more, BRICS members trade with each other in their own currencies, without using the US dollar.

This chart, again from the Visual Capitalist, is worth staring at a bit:

As the chart notes, the US dollar is still , but that chart isn’t comforting. Remember that China, not the US, is the trade partner of the most nations in the world. And note that while the US is China’s export destination, exports to the US accounted for 2.9% of Chinese GDP, down from 3.5% in 2018. Eighteen percent of China’s exports went to the US in 2023.

The point, here, is that if you can’t sell to America because of tariffs, and if the US doesn’t have much you want to buy because China is cheaper, why do you need the US dollar?

If the US dollar loses privilege, if people won’t accept it because it can be used in trade with any country, then America has a problem: it can’t just print dollars any more and if it can’t print dollars any more, Americans can’t keep massively over-consuming.

This means a massive demand drop from Americans: they will have to consume much less. You might think that means an opportunity for American firms to step into the breach, but this will happen with very little demand from in the American market (and with the trade war, no one else is going to be buying from the US as their first, second or third choice.)

The American cost structure is high and American “capitalists” prefer to play financial games to make things. The American competency crisis is real, and not caused by DEI. The market has high barriers to entry, incumbents addicted to oligopoly profits and no basic machine industry and almost no basic electronic parts manufacturing.

The transition period will be ugly. Beyond ugly. Quite likely “economic collapse” level ugly.

There was a way to use tariffs and industrial strategy, but starting a trade war with half the world all at almost the same time was not the way to do it. You pick sectors (start with machine tools and basic electronic and machine parts), tariff that, put in subsidies and restructure the market for those goods. Once that’s going, you move back up the chain.

That’s how you use tariffs and industrial policy to reindustrialize.

Trump’s tariff plans are based on assumptions that are not going to hold in the real world, during a global trade war. Tariffs are important and often good and I support their use, but like everything else, they must be used intelligently.

Enough for today, we’ll talk about the effects (almost entirely positive) of Trump’s tariffs on everyone else in the world next. Trump is doing what no one else could: destroying the American empire and the neoliberal world order. I’m very thankful and as long as we can avoid war Trump’s actions are positive in the middle to long term for far more people than they’re bad for. Just, well, not Americans in the short to middle term or anyone who gets invaded.

More soon.

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Trump’s Doing Everyone A Favor With His Tariffs (Emphasis on Canada)

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On January 28, 2025

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(Keyboard fixed, at least for now, so let’s get on with it.)

Trump has threatened blanket tariffs on multiple nations, including most of Europe, Canada and Mexico. This is an effective threat. The Bank of Canada estimated the effect of such tariffs on Canada at six percent of GDP, and I’ve seen an estimate for Germany of about one percent of GDP, after previous losses due to anti-Russia sanction effects on energy costs.

But what this tells us is that many nations are over-dependent on trade with America. Our economies are too intertwined with America’s economy, especially Canada’s. America’s massive and persistent trade deficits also indicate that America isn’t competitive. This isn’t a surprise, the American economy is controlled by oligopolies and monopolies with middlemen taking unearned profits and the overall cost structure, from housing to medical care to everything else is high, especially with respect to asset prices, which have been deliberately inflated since about 1979.

What we should do, all of us who are being threatened, is tell the US to fuck itself, slap retaliatory tariffs on the US, add in export tariffs so the US really hurts, and reorient trade towards each other—form a trade bloc without the US.

It’s worth pointing out that many of Trump’s tariffs are essentially illegal under various trade agreements the US has signed. Yet no one doubts that Trump can impose these tariffs despite their illegality. Remember that a signed treaty has the force of law in the US.

The US is, and has been a rogue nation for a long time and the rule of law means nothing in America.

I’m going to talk primarily about Canada because I know the situation here best. We’ll start with a little history.

For most of Canadian history, we exported mostly raw and refined resources to America. Minerals, oil, fish, lumber and so on. Often it was illegal to export them without doing at least primary processing: no raw logs, fish were canned in Canada and so on.

The original sin of over-integration with the US was the US-Canada auto-pact. We got a lot of jobs and factories out of it, but it was used as leverage over us. When Canada’s world-leading aviation industry of the 50s produced a jet, the Avro Arrow, which was much better than any American jet, the US threatened to take away the auto-pact unless we ended the program. And by end, I mean we disbanded Avro and we sunk the jets in a lake. Male engineers were hired by US firms, the female engineers got to be housewives, since the US in the 50s was 100% a patriarchal society. (As an aside, this was a post-war thing, the 30s were not as patriarchal.)

This story is so flaming hot in Canada that the original classification was renewed when it was due to end. Even now Canadians are angry about the Avro Arrow, something which happened 7 decades ago.

In the 80s, Prime Minister Brian Mulroney wanted a free trade pact with the US to ensure market access. Most Canadians were against it and the 88 election was fought about the FTA. Mulroney won because the anti-FTA vote was split between the Liberal and NDP parties. He rammed thru the FTA, which was later rolled into NAFTA and is now called the USMCA.

The deal included a lot more than just trade, it had IP laws and reduced the ability of Canada to use tariffs and subsidies itself and including nasty taking laws which made it nearly impossible to regulate foreign companies in Canada. Because our nation sells so many resources, the Canadian dollar tends to fluctuate a lot. When it’s high (it was higher than the US dollar for a couple years around 2015, for example) it’s devastating to our industry.

The old policy, which started around 1880 or so was called the Canadian mixed economy. When the dollar was high because of high resource prices, we’d subsidize manufacturing. When it was low, we’d subsidize resource producers and gave generous unemployment benefits to laid off resource workers.

That policy created one of the best and most prosperous economies in world history. But the condition which allowed it was that we had strong ties to both the British Empire/Commonwealth and to the US. In the 70s, the Brits, under intense US pressure since the end of WWII had their economy basically collapse. They had to go to the IMF for help and joined the EU, which bailed them out. The result of that was that their trade became very oriented towards the EU and the Commonwealth countries were left on their own.

Without a counterweight against the US, Canada felt weak. It didn’t stop Pierre Trudeau (the current PMs father) from telling the US to suck it when necessary, he even closed the border at one point, but Mulroney didn’t have the balls and he was right that our hand had become a lot weaker.

So Mulroney rammed thru the FTA. He was repaid by the Progressive Conservative party being essentially wiped out in the next election. Canadians really didn’t want the FTA/NAFTA. But once it was in, no successor government got rid of it.

The result was that Canada lost most of its industrial base. Ironically we even lost a lot of those auto-pact jobs, as American auto companies got their pants beaten off them by Japan and South Korea.

Pre-FTA about 30% of our exports to the US were autos and auto parts, 20% were petroleum, and miscellaneous machinery was about 15%.

Fast forward to today, 30% of our exports are petroleum, 13% are automobiles (the pact), and miscellaneous machinery is about 8%.

Can you say Dutch disease? Sure you can.

We’ve become a much more one note exporter, which is why Alberta and Saskatchewan are betraying our united front. They do most of the exporting, after all.

But the larger point is general de-industrialization and over-dependence on American markets. This has become enhanced over the last 8 years as our relations with China have degraded, due to Trudeau’s stupidity and pandering to America.

If this anti-China pandering worked, if it made it so America wouldn’t pull shit like tariffs, maybe it could be justified, but all its done is hurt our relationship with a potential trade partner and counter-weight to America’s influence on our economy.

So, what to do?

To start, leave the USMCA. The US has never obeyed NAFTA or the USMCA when it didn’t want to. Back in the 00s they slapped tariffs on timber, and ignored repeated rulings against them. We should have left then, but better later than never.

Second, start rebuilding our own industrial base. We still have plenty of scientists and engineers and vibrant universities. We can still bring in more scientists and engineers if we need to. This will require tariffs and subsidies, so institute them.

Third, bribe the resource workers who will be hurt. Just straight up find a way to give them a big chunk of change.

Fourth, re-institute Canadian ownership laws which require companies to be 51% Canadian owned, including foreign subsidiaries. Have the government take an additional 10%, and promise that all dividends from that 10% will be shared with Canadian citizens as direct deposits every year. Make it clear that we are willing to trade, but that trade no longer includes the right of foreigners to buy up our economy.

Fifth, form trade deals with countries other than the US. These should be bilateral or small multilateral in most cases with tariffs and subsidies allowed on both sides for key industries. We should pick a few industry sectors to concentrate on, and trade with other countries in the other sectors: that way they get something in exchange for the deal.

Sixth, go back to the old cyclical subsidization system: industry when our currency is high, resources when it’s low. Make it so that ordinary workers (and voters) are protected from the cyclical effects of a dual economy.

Seventh, put a lot of the resource profits into a sovereign wealth fund, to reduce the cyclical effects and provide the inevitable busts and for the inevitable and ongoing movement away from petrochemicals. Like it or not, alternative energy is coming on strong and the days of the petrol economy are drawing down. We’ve still got a couple decades to go, but the role of government is to make these long term plans. The fund should prioritize investments in petroleum regions, both to get them onside and to prepare them for the drawdown.

There’s plenty more details, of course, but these are the fundamentals. We’ll talk more, soon, about how trade should actually work if it’s to be for the benefit of all countries. Needless to say, such a regime would have princicples almost directly in opposition to those that have existed under GATT and its successor, the WTO.

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If You Really Hate DEI & Actually Want Merit, There Is A Way

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On January 23, 2025

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There’s a lot of pushback on DEI these days, with some major companies ending their DEI programs. This has been tied into the competence crisis, which is bullshit.

Let’s put the idea that there isn’t massive discrimination to rest. There have been many studies. One found that identical resumes from people with black names vs. people with white names had half the interview requests. A meta-study found the effect less overall: 24%.

Now I don’t know if DEI overcomes that, but modern studies don’t find any less of a gap, so I’m guessing “no”, though the effect on promotion may be more significant.

The obvious solution is to do something similar to the how orchestras evaluate musicians: they place them behind a screen, and they play their music. The evaluators don’t know who’s playing, or anything about them.

Modern technology makes this viable: wipe the resume of any identifying remarks and do the same with any testing. Have the interview with an avatar with a computer masked voice. If you really want to evaluate entirely on merit: their record and their abilities, that would be the way to do it.

The counter-argument is “cultural fit” and I’m not going to say that there’s nothing to it. The evidence is that diverse teams improve quality at the cost of speed and increased conflict but the benefits don’t accrue for teams which don’t work together much. If you’re doing something you already know how to do, where quality isn’t much of a factor, speed is and team members don’t interact much anyway, then there’s a case for “cultural fit” teams. But if you’re dealing with uncertainty, or quality is more important than speed, then a diverse team is probably better.

(Amusingly the evidence is that startup funds perform less well without diversity, but silicon valley hates diversity and prioritizes fit, which is one reason for their under-performance the last couple decades since the tech-bros took charge.)

I’m not a huge fan of DEI. It introduces a variable that shouldn’t matter. Problem is that variable already matters, and DEI is an effort to counter people hiring less competent people because of prejudice.

But there is another solution: one that prioritizes merit, at least for hiring (and it could be extended to some types of promotion decisions). Decisions based on blinding out gender and race.

If the real issue is merit and not something else, this is the obvious way to go. Strange how rarely it is suggested.

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The Competency Crisis Is Not About DEI

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On January 15, 2025

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That DEI (women and brown people) are responsible is a constant right wing cry.

The competency crisis is a result of an economy where making money without making a product is easier than making something. We prioritized financial profits—multi generational rises in asset prices that were faster than inflation. Housing went up. Stocks went up. Private equity earned money buy buying companies, larding them up with debt, and running them into the ground. Profits were juiced by moving production offshore and engaging in regulatory and labor arbitrage.

The best profit came from playing financial games and rentierism. You didn’t have to make anything or delivery anything, you just had to find a way to squeeze money out of something by making it go up faster than inflation, or by destroying something which was already built, taking all the future value now and giving it to yourself. Even the (old) Middle Class got in on this, by buying houses when they were cheap, watching them appreciate faster than wages, then selling them when old and moving south to be have their bums wiped in cheaper southern states by brown immigrants.

Everyone wanted to make money without having to create to get it. Mostly they either wanted to get unearned money from appreciation, to destroy what others had built, or to capture a market in an oligopoly or monopoly so they could juice prices.

Meanwhile, the manufacturing floor moved to China and elsewhere. The people who knew how to make things retired, moved to other jobs, retired and eventually died.

We can’t build most things because we haven’t prioritized building things, or getting better at building things since the 70s. The eighties are where predatory capitalism took hold, and since then the whole game has been rentierism, unearned gains, predation and arbitrage.

DEI doesn’t much matter in comparison. The people running the economy for the last 45 years have been mostly white males, and that doesn’t matter either. Women or brown people would have done the same thing. Margaret Thatcher was a woman, and one of the founders of this mindset.

No one’s competent at actually doing things, except profit extraction, because our societies haven’t prioritized doing anything but extracting profit for over 45 years. Everyone who lived in a society that was about really delivering products and making things is dead or retired.

if you want a competent society again, make it so that no one can get wealthy, let alone rich, without really making something or improving people’s lives. And no, Facebook and Google and so on don’t count, because they were started as good, and made shitty to increase profits. That’s the opposite of what’s needed. (AI in the US will be the same.)

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Elon Musk Threatens Congress Successfully

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On December 20, 2024

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This is some amazing shit:

Congress was about to vote on a bill called a “Continuing Resolution”, which would fund the operations of the federal government. But yesterday, Musk started tweeting around the clock about how he hated the bill and that he would fund the campaigns of politicians who ran against Congress members who supported it.

….Shortly after Musk decided he was against the Continuing Resolution, Trump and JD Vance issued a statement saying they were against it, too. The politicians in Congress fell in line, and now it looks like the government funding plan is dead.

Here’s the thing. Being rich only means you’re good at making money in a specific way. It doesn’t mean anything else. Gates, for example, pushed the “Common Core” education changes, and there’s no evidence they did any good and some reason to think they were harmful.

We have a rich man (maybe a billionaire) as President. We have Musk, the world’s richest man, who spent a lot money helping Trump win as one of the most important people in the new administration, who has said he wants to cut Social Security and Medicare.

Money is the ability to tell people what do. It let’s you control their actions, either directly or indirectly.

FDR defined fascism as:

Ownership of Government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power

The US has been trending towards oligarchy for ages. The final victory for oligarchy was probably “Citizen’s United”, which made money the same as speech and thus protected under the first amendment.

The famous Princeton oligarchy study, which used data from 1981-2002, which is to say from back when the rich weren’t nearly as powerful as they are now, found that:

…when one holds constant net interest-group alignments and the preferences of affluent Americans, it makes very little difference what the general public thinks. The probability of policy change is nearly the same (around 0.3) whether a tiny minority or a large majority of average citizens favor a proposed policy change (refer to the top panel of figure 1).

By contrast—again with other actors held constant—a proposed policy change with low support among economically-elite Americans (one out of five in favor) is adopted only about 18 percent of the time, while a proposed change with high support (four out of five in favor) is adopted about 45 percent of the time. Similarly, when support for policy change is low among interest groups (with five groups strongly opposed and none in favor) the probability of that policy change occurring is only .16, but the probability rises to .47 when interest groups are strongly favorable (refer to the bottom two panels of figure 1). Footnote 41

Musk is the world’s richest man. He threatened members of Congress using his money, and they caved.

It’s always amusing when Americans call Russia an oligarchy. It isn’t. Russia’s oligarchs have very little power compared to Putin. If they cross him, he destroys them. They do what he wants, when he wants or they go to jail or have to flee the country, giving up any wealth in Russia.

America, on the other hand, is sickeningly an oligarchy and it’s going from indirect to direct oligarchical control.

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France Is Being Kicked Out of YET Another French Country

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On November 29, 2024

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Recently French troops have had to leave Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso. Now it’s Chad booting them.

Update: Senegal has now announced it intends to seek the withdrawal of French troops.

The first three countries have Russian troops in them now. Wonder how long it’ll be before Chad joins the crowd?

France has been the most important country in a lot of its ex-colonies in Africa, but it’s losing its place, not just militarily but economically. Countries are turning to China for imported goods and development at the same time as they turn to Russia for security. Chinese goods, development and loans are cheaper, and neither Russia nor China interfere nearly as much in domestic politics.

It’s just a better deal. For a long time you HAD to go to the West, but now Russia and China can supply pretty much everything you need.

 

As regular readers know I’ve been following Europe’s collapse for a few years now. It’s practically a freefall. In Germany Volkswagon, for example, is planning on closing factories for the first time.

Europe’s well on its way to being what it was for most of history: a backwards and irrelevant peninsula, with the main action and most important civilizations elsewhere in Asia.

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Why Assisted Suicide Bills Will Proliferate & Deaths Will Increase

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On November 25, 2024

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Nothing saves money on people who are old, disabled and unable to work like just killing them.

Covid killed mostly old people. That saved the government money in the long run, although in the short run it was expensive, except for Sweden where they just euthanized their old people with Covid instead of treating them. (Gave them opiods even when they had enough oxygen and drugs.)

Since Covid, however, there’s been an unfortunate increase in people who can’t work because they’re chronically ill.

This isn’t hard to understand. Britain is massively importing young people who can work, or older people who have lots of money, but at the same time the number of people who are liabilities, financially speaking, is exploding. If you have a liability the easiest way to get rid of it is to… get rid of it.

Canada’s in the same boat, and these bills will spread.

Assisted suicide isn’t automatically a bad thing, mind you. If people were properly supported and cared for I’d support it. People who are in a ton of pain and won’t get better ought to have the option.

But when the government is whining about benefits and cutting them, as in Britain, one doesn’t expect this is being done from a humanitarian impulse. And the medical and social workers, in hospitals and palliative care centers that are overstretched and don’t have enough nurses or doctors or beds, well, convincing someone who’s taking up time or a bed to just die already will have to be pretty tempting, sometimes even with somewhat good motives: to free up resources for people who can be cared for.

But, of course, what will often happen is that chronically ill people or homeless types who could live for quite a long time and with proper care could be fairly happy will wind up dead because in Britain and Canada we don’t help them enough: to get enough housing, food, help and pain meds (given the way we’re so scared of opiates.)

Wikipedia lists some known cases of abuse of the law:

  • In 2017, a mother of a young woman with cerebral palsy was told by a doctor that not applying for MAID was “selfish”. Her daughter was in the room when the conversation took place and described the experience as traumatic.[71]
  • In 2018, Roger Foley was being treated for cerebellar ataxia at an Ontario hospital. Foley alleged that his only options were to be forcibly discharged from the hospital and then treated by an organization that had previously failed to provide him adequate care or apply for MAID. Foley hired a lawyer for a charter challenge.[72]
  • In 2019, Alan Nichols successfully applied for MAID while being hospitalized for suicide ideation. The reason given on his application was hearing loss.[1]
  • In September 2021, Rosina Kamis, a 41-year-old Malaysian woman, applied for MAID citing fibromyalgia as the reason. However, in conversations and recordings shared with friends, she mentioned financial hardship and social isolation as additional factors influencing her decision.[73]
  • In February 2022, an anonymous Torontonian suffering from extreme chemical sensitivity syndrome with the pseudonym Sophia had a medically assisted death after failing to find affordable housing that was free from tobacco smoke and other chemicals.[74] This case was addressed by her health care provider in testimony provided to the Special Joint Committee on MAID, and was referenced in their final report.[75]

One can safely assume there are many, many more. The fact is that even doctors and social workers think some lives are worth more than others. No one who’s spent time in the medical system believes otherwise.

The West is in decline. Our elites are wedded to austerity as a “solution”. They often, probably usually, feel that people who are non-productive are useless eaters and a burden on the state.

That combination is going to lead to a truly vast expansion of measures intended to get people off benefit rolls.

In a way assisted suicide, or euthanasia, is the most honest of those policies and maybe even the most merciful. There’s nothing honest about deliberate policies which make people homeless, leading to most of their deaths, after all. Politicians know that winding up on the street long term is essentially a death sentence, they know that policies like mass immigration without increasing the housing supply to match will cause homelessness, so they know their policies cause homelessness and death but they can pretend it’s an unintended side effect.

Just killing people is at least not hypocritical.

***

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What Is A Communist?

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On November 11, 2024

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One annoying tendency in modern political discourse is right wingers and centrists calling people communist.

They don’t know what the word means.

A communist believes that the means of production should be owned and controlled by the proletariat: the workers.

If you don’t believe this, you aren’t a communist. Wanting universal healthcare doesn’t mean you’re a communist unless you think the health workers themselves (or, just perhaps, the party or government) should control the healthcare providers.

Wanting universal healthcare, in the modern context, makes you a socialist.

Now there’s a lot of argument around what it means for the proletariat to control the means of production. If the “Party” controls it, like in the USSR or pre-Deng China, is that communism, or is it just old fashioned government authoritarianism?

Is modern China communist? About half the economy isn’t controlled by the Party, and worker co-ops are minor players. There’s clearly a capitalist class controlling vast amounts of the means of production, though government is very willing to intervene. The Chinese Communist party says this is still communism but that seems like a stretch to me. The same is true in Vietnam: the Communist party is in charge, but the economy isn’t communist.

Note that you could have a market economy which IS communist. If workers co-ops or something similar control most of the organizations, that would be communism, and it’s something that a lot of intellectuals in America and Europe during the 50s pushed for: a sort of “best of both worlds.”

Centralized control economies like the USSR, from this point of view can’t really be communist, because the workers aren’t really controlling capital.

For myself, I’d say moving away from stock companies and towards a mix of worker owned organizations and perhaps mutual companies (or mixed versions) would be the best way to move towards something that might both be communist and workable, allowing the dynamism of the market.

Generally speaking my time in the workforce convinced me that upper management is usually clueless because they don’t do the job and haven’t done it in ages. You have to be on the front lines to have some idea what the issues actually are.

Communism is worker control of capital, and nothing else. We’ve never really tried it.

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