Note

1. • Anyone not already knowledgeable about Canada and contemplating Mr. Trump's 51st state idea should consult at least Wikipedia's basic pages describing aspects of Canada's geography, population, governance, and economy before reading this essay.

      

   • Further, I take a very negative view of Canadian politics but anyone interested in the opposite view, that Canada is the positive and intentional construct of great men, should consult Conrad Black's epic 1,100 page History of Canada.

      

I have a number of "ignorant and abhorrent" ideas about how to do things - and I'm comfortable calling them that because I know first how little I know, and second that no expert would ever consider any of them. With that in mind, here are three of them, all variations on the poison pill idea  - with rational comments very much requested.

At present (September 4/24) the democrat campaign for president has re-iterated a proposal previously rejected by Congress to tax what they're calling unrealized capital gains. According to the campaign the new tax will only affect the very rich - those with net assets valued at over 100 million dollars - but, of course, the same people swore monies spent on an IRS hiring binge would only be used to pursue very rich tax delinquents instead of the poor and middle class filers they're really going after.

An Alberta Nuclear Strategy

Background information

Saskatchewan and Alberta are western Canadian prairie provinces both of which are currently run by conservative political parties; both have economies largely dependent on agriculture and hydrocarbons; and, both governments claim responsibility for the management of electrical power generation and distribution in their jurisdictions. Saskatchewan has about 1.35 million people; Alberta just over 4 million.

Read a broad cross section of on-line news and commentary sites from outside the progressive echo chamber and you'll see lots of seemingly intelligent and thoughtful people arguing that labeled groups such as Marxists, Greens, the Woke, or just Radical Democrats are communists out to destroy the United States.

A long time ago people said that if Steve Jobs was filmed walking across San Francisco bay, the systems industry media headlines would all scream "Jobs can't swim!", and that's really what's going on with major media coverage of Danielle Smith and the UCP too: the people involved generally know almost nothing about economics or governance but continually tell each other they're experts and that, combined with the left's assumed moral superiority and the federal government's massive subsidies to approved media organizations, is what powers their current campaign against Smith and anyone else

Disclaimer: there are so many unknowns in the history of Covid19, and so much that is thought to be known is actually of uncertain value, that this article is intended only as an imaginative alternative history.

(An aside: the title was inspired by someone else's debunking of a speculative paper on the grounds that it presented a theory without measurement, with the added LOL note that he intended no insult to string theory.)

Three paragraphs from my 2011 essay Explaining the Health Care Disaster in Canada summarize the issues:

If you find yourself premier this fall you are going to have to pivot to winning the next election - and you only have two options: campaigning while doing as little as possible to disturb the course of government or pushing immediate change through caucus.

Inflation is popularly thought of as what happens when too much money chases too few goods -and that's sort of true, but incomplete. More generally both price and currency inflation refer to change over time in the ratio of the value (V) of that subset of the goods, services, and expectations (e.g. rents) in the world economy normally priced in the currency of interest and the number of units (N) of that currency in use.