Unpopular take: INEQUALITY IS GOOD if it arises in a free market, rules-based economy. INNOVATION: First order, certain entrepreneurs add a lot of value to society and become very wealthy (everyone benefits from new products sold in a free market). Second order: economic growth accelerates, investments perform well (e.g., strong US stock performance vs. poor Europe stock performance). Investment accumulation separates people and necessarily generates inequality. Note that in large part this inequality applies to individuals over their own lifetime and is in no way unjust (e.g., most individuals do not benefit from capital accumulation at 20 years old but benefit considerably at 65 years old, yet commentators decry wealth inequality between 65 years old and 20 years old). KNOWLEDGE ECONOMY: Any human can add a lot more value in a knowledge economy with access to international markets. Moving to an advanced knowledge economy is generally beneficial for everyone in absolute terms. The fact that any one person can add value for a lot of people is beneficial to both innovators and consumers. Inequality being the symptom of this success means that a lot of people got better off. TAXATION: An innovative economy with vast creation of wealth can fund government responsibilities with low tax rates. For instance, in the USA the rich pay a larger share of collected income taxes than in Europe despite much lower tax rates. The lower the tax rates, the faster capital, productivity and innovation accumulate, producing a flywheel effect. Lower resulting taxation on middle and lower classes, all else equal, is beneficial for the masses in absolute terms. LIFE EXPECTANCIES: a significant contributor to wealth inequality is lengthening of life expectancies, enabling longer capital accumulation and longer compounding of income. Widening of inequality is to be expected as societies age and get healthier. CONCLUSION: Wealth inequality is symptomatic of several beneficial trends in a free market and competitive economy. Wealth inequality is harmful (in many 3rd world countries, including in socialist/communist countries) when: 1) The government picks favorites, enables monopolies or oligopolies 2) The government forcibly seizes and concentrate wealth 3) The rich control large interventionist governments and redirect spending or regulations to their advantage and undermine competition 4) The rich get rich without adding value for the poor and middle class, due to regulations, political favors, fraud or subsidies 5) Socialist leaders and intellectuals convince the poor and middle classes that the rich got rich without adding value, leading to resentment and instability Lastly, inequality is natural for several reasons including general randomness, geography, culture, upbringing and general variability in human IQ. Attempts to eliminate inequalities are directly opposed to human freedom, have repeatedly backfired and have led to the most harmful types of government-led inequalities described above. If you found this insightful please repost.

As a US taxpayer, I look forward to Canada keeping global sea lanes open, making sure Israel isn’t leveled out by nuclear weapons, protecting Europe from Russia, and making sure China doesn’t invade Taiwan. Leadership requires capability, responsibility and willingness to make hard choices that others will criticize. This idea of a minor power “leading” a “coalition of like-minded countries” solely on the basis of presumed moral goodness has no precedent and no logical basis. Each of the entities in such coalition are much more dependent on the US military and economically than the rest of this coalition put together. I’m sure Europe would LOVE to give the finger to the USA but they CANNOT.

Only 45 homicides in El Salvador through September 20. Bukele took a falling homicide rate and drove it to near-elimination. No lectures on “root causes.” No “socioeconomic factors”. No prosecutors releasing repeat offenders. No NGOs defending the bottom 1%. The only variable is who stays in prison.

🚨🇦🇷🇺🇳 @JMilei took to the UN podium and proceeded to absolutely unload… on the UN itself. 🤣 He called the organization “useless” and accused it of feeding a “caste of fatally arrogant parasites disguised as well-intentioned bureaucrats.” An institution meant to protect security and human rights has instead failed, while “chaos, violence and international terrorism” have flourished. Going to the UN to tell the UN it’s useless... boss move Writer: Lynn

The freest economy in American history produced the greatest explosion of living standards the world had ever witnessed, and the people who benefited most were the poor. Between 1870 and 1900, real GDP per capita roughly doubled. Steel output went from 77,000 tons in 1870 to over 11 million tons by 1900. Kerosene dropped so cheap that even working-class families could light their homes at night. Carnegie drove down steel prices while paying wages that rose faster than inflation. The market did that. No regulator in Washington achieved this. Federal spending in 1870 sat at roughly 3.7% of GDP. Congress had no income tax until 1913. The regulatory state was microscopic. Capital formation exploded precisely because entrepreneurs kept what they built. But there is a villian here: the progressive revision of this history. Academics frame the Gilded Age as a catastrophe of exploitation, demanding the state as savior. The numbers destroy that story. Real wages for unskilled labor rose 50% between 1860 and 1890. Infant mortality fell. Life expectancy climbed. What about technology? Could some important things have been invented during that time? Only AC power, the lightbulb, the telephone, the camera, the automobile, the airplane... nothing really important. Property rights worked. Contract enforcement worked. Sound money, anchored to gold, kept capital allocation honest and prevented governments from inflating savings into dust. The progressives arrived after 1900 and systematically dismantled each pillar: the income tax in 1913, the Federal Reserve in 1913, regulatory agencies multiplying through the 1920s. Growth slowed. Then the Fed contracted the money supply and Congress passed Smoot-Hawley, and you got 1929. The state caused that collapse and later blamed it on the free market.

Talked to a Canadian manufacturer tonight he told me his business is totally dead because of US tariffs and he said, and I quote: "if another liberal tells me to pivot to Europe im going to punch them in the mouth. There is a goddamn ocean in the way. They have no clue!"

ANOTHER Canadian Company is facing the reality they must move to America to keep their business going 👀 Aeris Protective Packaging Inc. a Canadian manufacturer, is opening a manufacturing plant in the United States ELBOWS UP 🇨🇦

Thomas Sowell: “The vocabulary of the political left is fascinating. For example, it is considered to be ‘materialistic’ and ‘greedy’ to want to keep what you have earned. But it is ‘idealistic’ to want to take away what someone else has earned and spend it for your own political benefit or to feel good about yourself.”

Ian Lee offers a wake-up call on Canada-US trade leverage: “Why don’t we Canadians tariff products that will hurt them, like potash, oil and gas?” “These are the natural resources. Natural resources are commodities. That means there’s a single price… Most of those natural resource commodities are a world price and you can source them… often from other countries around the world.” On size: “The totality of our exports, 400 billion going to the States is 1.5% of US GDP. And I don’t think anyone’s going to argue you can bring down any company or country because they lose 1.5%.” “Even if we eradicated all exports to the United States, it would affect 1.5% of US GDP.” “They’re so large at 32 trillion and we are relatively so small that we don’t have the leverage or the clout or the muscle… to inflict serious pain on the United States.” “This is arithmetic, this isn’t theory. The numbers do not support the idea that a 2 trillion economy can devastate a 32 trillion economy that can source from the rest of the world.” Commodities have world prices. Canada’s entire export book to the US is a rounding error on a $32T economy. That’s the constraint @SprottSchool

Canada is in self-destruct mode. Canada used to train Chinese military personnel, on Canadian soil. The AMERICANS were furious and made Canada end that relationship. Now Canada is joining with China, once again. LOST FREEDOM FILES # 5359

🇺🇸🇨🇦 Mark Carney reopened military talks with the PLA after eight years and let Beijing announce it first. You don’t sit inside NORAD, share continental radar, and run a binational air-defence command while quietly coordinating with the Chinese military. That is not “diversification.” That is a an entirely new direction. Washington will treat it as one. This is how Canadian participation in NORAD, NORAD modernization, the Defence Production Sharing Agreement, and the rest of the joint US-Canada defence architecture gets put on the chopping block. Allies don’t hand the other side a seat at the table and keep the same keys to the house.

China just restarted military talks with Canada after eight years of silence. Ottawa hasn't said a word about it. On September 4, the two countries held the 5th China-Canada Defense Coordination Dialogue, the first time that channel has been used since April 2018. Only Beijing announced it, through its Ministry of National Defense. Canada has issued no public statement confirming the meeting happened. That silence isn't an accident. China controls the entire narrative here: it decides what gets said, when, and how it's framed. Canada gets none of that leverage by staying quiet, but going public risks reopening a fight over Taiwan, the South China Sea, and Chinese coercion that Ottawa has spent the last year trying to quietly move past. The talks also land right as Canada's relationship with Washington is under real strain over trade, timing that hands Beijing a cheap propaganda win it didn't have to lift a finger for. The dialogue channel died the moment Canada arrested Huawei's CFO in 2018. It's back now because Mark Carney has spent over a year rebuilding ties with Beijing, tariff cuts on canola, resumed flights, a Wang Yi visit, all while Canada still officially lists concerns about Chinese military behavior in the region.

OOPS 👀 Now Sapporo beer is moving production from Canada to the United States 👀 more to come likely 🇨🇦 Elbows Up

Today feels like a good day to reshare this clip of Ariane Aerospace’s CEO calling SpaceX’s reusability plans “a dream”

The 11th juror, holding out for justice for those three beautiful children!

On radically different incomes life in America can be surprisingly similar. Imagine three single mothers, each raising a ten-year-old boy. One is a public-school teacher in Tampa earning $50,000 a year. Another is a lawyer in Atlanta earning $200,000. The third is a venture-capital partner in Chicago earning $1 million. On paper, they inhabit three different Americas. One earns twenty times more than another. One is 25th percentile im wealth the other 84th the last one top 1%. They describe inequality in the USA. Now look at their sons. All three wake up with electricity, running water, refrigeration, heating and air conditioning. They eat plenty of food, ride in safe modern cars, wear sneakers, watch YouTube, play the same video games, use similar phones and tablets and have access to vaccines, antibiotics, dentists and modern medicine. One goes to public school, another to private school, the third perhaps to an elite private school. One flies economy once a year, another travels frequently, the third may occasionally fly private. Their houses, neighborhoods and vacations are different. But their actual daily lives are far less different than their mothers’ incomes suggest. The socialist argument has always been about equality of outcomes. Well, look around. In much of ordinary material life, capitalism has already produced something remarkably close to it. The millionaire’s refrigerator does not keep milk twenty times fresher. Her son’s iPhone does not make YouTube twenty times more entertaining. He cannot eat twenty breakfasts, sleep twenty hours at once or enjoy a video game twenty times more because his mother earns twenty times as much. For several hours every day, these three boys may be doing almost exactly the same thing. This would have been unimaginable two centuries ago. The child of a rich family and the child of a laborer often lived in genuinely different physical worlds. One had plentiful food, warmth, books, servants, doctors and transportation. The other might lack adequate calories or clean water. Industrial capitalism destroyed much of that inequality by doing something socialism never managed very well: making formerly scarce things cheap enough for almost everyone. Cars, refrigerators, televisions, air conditioning, computers and smartphones began as luxuries and became mass-market goods. The entrepreneur became rich precisely by making what the rich had available to everybody else. And that may explain one of the great ironies of the new American enthusiasm for socialism. Capitalism’s victories are now so complete that nobody notices them. Clean water is not considered wealth. Neither is electricity. Nor refrigeration. Nor an air-conditioned bedroom, instant global communication, unlimited music, thousands of films or a computer in your pocket more powerful than anything that existed when many of today’s billionaires were children. Those things have become invisible because almost everyone has them. What remains visible are the inequalities capitalism has not eliminated: the mansion, the private school, the beachfront house, the prestigious university, the best neighborhood. But if the political demand is that ordinary people should be able to enjoy many of the same basic experiences as the rich, something extraordinary has already happened. Put these families on a chart and the inequality looks enormous. Put their ten-year-old boys on three sofas at eight o’clock at night, eating pizza in sweatpants and staring at nearly identical screens, and the difference becomes surprisingly hard to see. Equality of income? Obviously not. Equality of many of the outcomes that actually fill a human day? Far more than we admit.

YUGE beat on jobs in Aug, not only b/c payrolls jumped 217k, but also b/c the number of folks employed roared higher by 569k and those not in the labor force dipped more than half a million; people flooded back into the labor market and were able to get jobs:

"If you don't unlock your door and let strangers into your house, don't complain when they break the windows to get inside. You created the broken glass. You made it a home invasion."

"You can't just stop the drug trade and overdose deaths by shutting down the border"

Here's the cabin that Dolly Parton grew up in with 11 siblings. No electricity or water. Dolly died worth $650+ million, after $500 million donated to charity! This is America.