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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   29218 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 6, 2025

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Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has resigned, a sign of yet more changing of the times as the Prime Minister since 2015 marks the end of an decade of Liberal Party rule of Canada, and possibly yet another political dynasty scalp Donald Trump may claim. While Trudeau's critics and issues go far beyond Trump, the internal-party revolt since the US 2024 election will put another person on the podium right as Donald Trump assumes office, part of a broader realignment in the West as governments including Germany, France, and others have seen falls- several deliberate- to re-roll priorities and mandates in (temporal) alignment with the change in the US presidency. (Canada's 2025 election, much like Germany's, is/was scheduled for October. Canada's parliament is suspended until 24 March where a new PM will (hopefully) be chosen.)

Broadly associated with the more progressive-woke politics, Trudeau's liberals are expected to face a shellacking, though whether that's as part of Canada's experience of the anti-incumbant wave of the last decade, a backlash to progressive politics, or Trudeau's own personal contribution. (Last year, 49% of respondents in a Canadian survey characterized the PM as 'Arrogant,' which is often just the first and more polite words in some lists.)

A (much) longer political obituary can be read here for those who are curious. Regardless of one's views of the man, the sun will continue to rise, the earth rotate, and life will go on.

But we may never get another world leader on camera in blackface.

Canada was the great laboratory of democracy that we needed. Trudeau's political obituary will be written with one word: immigration.

Trudeau's nearly 10 year reign witnessed the largest transformation in Canadian history since European settlement: the replacement of a largely European population with a multicultural blend of cultures from around the world.

This has had disastrous and likely permanent consequences. While leftists might have cheered the new, vibrant additions to the nation's food and street culture, even right-leaning Canadians were generally pro-immigration. The consensus was that Canada's points-based admissions system would lead to incredible economic gains if nothing else. We now know that that is false. Canada's economy has been stagnant over the last 10 years while the US economy has soared. In fact, on a per-capita level Canada's economy has been in a recession now for over 6 quarters.

Canada's population has increased by large amounts since 2015. The country now groans under an influx of millions of new immigrants. Since Trudeau took office, Canada's population has increased from less than 36 million to over 41 million. Nearly 100% of the gain has been as a result of immigration. Housing prices have soared, making owning a home an unreachable dream for almost all young people. Rents for apartments have seen similar increases. Wages, on the other hand have stagnated, and remain at levels far below those of the US. Far from the fever dream of immigrants doing useful labor such as building new housing, the new arrivals are competing aggressively for the same sort of high wage sinecures and government benefits that native-born Canadians previously thought they were entitled to. The frog is being boiled much too quickly, and people are noticing.

Mass immigration is now proven a failed policy. It remains to be seen whether it is possible for Canada to recover. I fear it might not be. With the Conservatives in charge, things will get bad less quickly, but it will take years for the consequences of the Trudeau years to be fully felt.

Housing prices have soared, making owning a home an unreachable dream for almost all young people. Rents for apartments have seen similar increases.

This is the fault of zoning ("greenbelts" or "urban growth boundaries"), not of immigration. 1 2 3

Adding 6 million immigrants to a country of 35 million absolutely makes a difference. How could it not?

Of course they will also compete for housing in the metropolitan areas. But the core of the problem are NIMBYism and people buying houses as investment. If the six million left Canada tomorrow, the rents would still be too damn high.

The real solution is building new houses (YIMBYism) and a Georgian land value tax to make unproductive hoarding of properties unattractive.

People who want georgist taxes think that's the answer to every problem though. It's the new MMT for /r/neoliberal posters now that "inflation doesn't matter" doesn't pass the laugh test.

Georgism doesn't pass the laugh test either. It's impossible to fund a modern government with land taxes alone. We'd have to revert to 1776 levels of taxation. Maybe not a bad thing overall, but kiss social security and aircraft carriers goodbye.

Nevertheless, more Georgist-esque taxes are a good thing. In major urban areas, we should tax land more and buildings less.

Will this "one weird trick" fix the fertility and housing crisis? No. But it might help, slightly.

It's impossible to fund a modern government with land taxes alone.

Source

America's annual land rents are sufficient to cover 18–40 % (Fed) or 34–78 % (Smith) of annual federal spending. The low-end figures come from 2020, which was a major outlier in federal spending thanks to COVID.

But wait, what about state budgets? Many states are funded by property taxes, so if we're going to shift to land value taxes, we need to take states into account, too. So let's add state budgets into the mix (minus federal funding to states so we're not double counting). If we do that, we drop to 18–30 % (Fed) or 36–58 % (Smith) of annual spending.

Georgism is equivalent to the elimination of private real property. I don't think that's going to fix the fertility crisis. If it "fixed" the housing crisis, it will be by accelerating the process of putting us in pods. This is why urbanists like Georgism, it forces property "owners" to develop "their" property to the utmost or pay taxes the property's income cannot support.

Surely there's a middle ground.

Imagine some lord who owned land in central London in 900 AD, used it as a sheep pasture, and then passed it down to his sons for 30 generations, each using it as a sheep pasture onto the present day. There's no property taxes because taxes = theft. The lords never sell or convert their land to non-pasture since the value goes up every year.

Why not just kill the lord, build a park everyone can use, and then piss on his rent-seeking grave?

Surely there is a place for reasonable accommodations to common sense in any system, even if we should err on the side of ancient liberties. For example, I think that on balance the electoral college is a good thing, but the pre-1832 rotten boroughs of England take things too far.

More comments

If the six million left Canada tomorrow, the rents would still be too damn high.

That's not accurate. Small changes at the margin lead to huge swings in price. For example, if world oil production were to decrease by 3%, prices would double in the short term.

6 million is 15% the population of Canada. That's a huge change at the margin. Rents would absolutely crater if they all left tomorrow.

I agree with all the other stuff about needing to build more, Georgian-esque taxes, etc... But since that's not something that any progressive democracy has ever done correctly, maybe don't import 15% of your population over a 1 decade period?

If those immigrants were building homes.

Of course, unlike Texas in 2005, these are college degree holders who don’t want to work with their hands. Also the government is unfriendly to building more houses.

One idea of how it could work is that the points system only gives points to construction workers. Then house prices rise at first, when every-one turns up, but they get jobs building houses. Eventually, having imported too many construction workers, builders' wages fall, and construction gets cheaper. House prices fall, or houses get larger :-)

That isn't going to work for immigration from India to Canada. Even if the construction workers are genuinely qualified, the Indian construction workers know how to build houses to withstand monsoon rains, but have no clue about the high level of insulation needed to stay warm in the Canadian winter.

but have no clue about the high level of insulation needed to stay warm in the Canadian winter.

This is really above the pay grade of your average hammer swinging construction worker. People who design houses need to be aware of this (and the million other housing code regulations) and presumably have to be licensed.

I think the bigger issue (because people can be trained to build houses) is that the Indians will game the system, work for the minimum number of years required, and then melt into the general population.

Then we'll need to bring over even more Indians to build houses for them and all their chain migration relatives, etc.. until Canada is basically just a northern outpost of India.

The better method to build houses without destroying your country would be to incentivize actual Canadians to build houses. Failing that, temporary workers with strict enforcement could work, but I don't think the government could credibly promise strict enforcement so citizens should be unwilling to accept that deal.

Then bring in more Mexicans. We don't have that many Mexicans in Pittsburgh, but do you know how many are in the building trades? All of them. Okay, some own restaurants and I used to work with a Mexican lawyer, but walk around the areas with above-average Mexican population (i.e. 10% Mexican, 90% white) and they're all driving beat up pickup trucks with sheets of plywood in the back. Hell, if you want to hire a contractor for anything smaller than a $20,000 renovation, Mexican handymen are pretty much your only option.

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