Buying Houses:

Buying houses has never been easy.

Back in the days when a single detached house could be bought for about $50,000, I envied a fellow employee, an older guy, for the fact that he had purchased his 1200-sq ft brick bungalow, detached, a few years earlier, for $25,000.

After thinking about it, I realized that he bought his house when the average weekly salary was less than $100.

That was in the 1950s. Since then, our dollar has been devalued steadily through steady taxation. Every time the politicians increased taxes, everybody had to increase prices on their produce just to stay in business. And everybody needed more dollars to buy the same old goods and services.

That is how money is devalued. Extreme example of that process was the Weimar Republic in Germany following WWI. Unable to keep up with the punitive reparations taxation of the winning allies, the government started printing money.

A story was told about a hungry man who went to a store for a loaf of bread pushing a wheelbarrow full of money. When he wasn't looking, a thief grabbed the wheelbarrow, dumped the money and ran.

That probably didn't happen, but it might have.

About 50 years ago, I used to collect pennies in a large crock. Ten years earlier, coffee was 10 cents. Chocolate bars were a nickel. Gasoline was 15 cents a gallon as recently as the '70s.

The millennials whining that they cannot buy a house should know that nobody ever bought a house on their own when they were 19 years old. We all had to work, save, think it through and be prepared to sacrifice lifestyle before making that kind of investment. 

Buying a home today is probably not more difficult than it's ever been when you factor in inflation. And while our politicians probably didn't get the printing presses rolling every time they needed money, they were quick to tax--all three levels of government.

The latest devaluation of our purchasing power is Trudeau's famous carbon tax on all provinces. While we don't have to get a wheelbarrow full of dollars to go to the store just yet, prices have jumped upward on everything we buy as industry tries to stay in business.

And yes, like all the other taxes, that tax has moved your plans to buy a house a few more years into the future.

Aha!!!

The US media is beginning to probe their system of education and it is not very inspiring. Apparently, academic success can be bought if you have enough money, political influence, or just the right connections. 

This could show us where all those scientists who support global warming and human-induced climate change for the United Nations propaganda mills come from. 

Incompetence? Whose?

That SNC Lavalin media panic smacks of something other than simply a judicial foul-up. 

There has to be something more behind it that the Liberals think the people who elected them are too stupid, or too stoned,  to understand.

All the media is clamoring for more juicy accusations from Wilson-Raybould. It is possible she has said enough.

Now we should put the PM on the stand and ask him to tell the whole truth. Why was she relieved of her post with the ministry of Justice? Is it possible that she couldn't handle it?

Is it possible that in making his ministry appointments sexually balanced by loading his caucus with women rather than people with actual qualifications, young Trudeau blew it?

If the SNC-Lavalin issue really is about employment, why now? Why not the pipelines and the Oil Sands? Doesn't the area west of Ontario belong to Canada too?

What's the problem? Not enough votes there?

Time for Trudeau to take the stand.

World Saviours:

What's the connection between the green energy events that put the cost of hydro out of reach for many Ontarians and the carbon tax that threatens to do the same for all Canadians?

That connection appears to be Gerald Butts. He is said to have teamed with Liberal leader Dalton McGinty when they bombed coal-fired power plants like Lakeview Hydro in Ontario, and with Justin Trudeau when they dumped a carbon tax on all commercial activity in Canada.

Having butted out of the picture over the SNC-Lavalin scandal, Butts abandoned his accomplice back on parliament Hill to fend for himself.

So, where does this green energy warrior come from? Is it possible that he might be a disciple of that late, great green energy guru Maurice Strong? 

For those who do not remember Maurice Strong, he was a fellow westerner who made his way from the Oil Patch east and into the corridors of power with the Liberals of the Chretien era. He used that as a springboard to infiltrate the United Nations corridors in New York. There, he was in the position to bend sympathetic ears on the business of saving the planet. He used that to launch save-the-planet campaigns. 

Inexplicably, he migrated to China, the country that probably showed the least interest in green initiatives and save-the-planet campaigns. 

Whether it was the smog from extensive coal-fired hydro or severe ideological clash that ended his career, Strong expired there quietly back in 2015.

Whether Strong had any real influence in creating the green energy zealots currently making life in Canada more oppressive and more expensive for everyone, it is up to the individual reader to connect the dots in any way they see fit.

Note: Anyone who wants to refresh one's memory of the life and times of Maurice Strong might Google the name. 
Warning: Do not trust everything you read there. Some of it reads like the conspiracy theories of the Flat Earth Society, but it should help us understand where guys like Justin Trudeau and Gerald Butts come from.

Credit Cards:

Banks spend a lot of money these days promoting their credit cards to young people.

What's the most important thing parents should tell their kids about credit cards?

It should be the fact that a credit card allows them to spend money they don't have.

That money belongs to the bank that issues the credit card and the deal is that if they do not repay the card promptly, the bank will charge them interest that can go as high as 25% or more.

When they issue a credit card, the bank is not doing anyone a favour. They're in the business of making money by issuing credit. What they are hoping to do is suck in the credit card holder to buy more than they can pay back, thus getting in deeper and deeper until they have to pay interest not only on the money they borrowed, but also on the interest they failed to pay back.

Credit cards are dangerous in the hands of kids or young adults because when they want something, they have to have it NOW. Not tomorrow, not next week. They can't wait until they have put away enough money to pay for whatever they just can't do without.

It is up to individual parents to figure out how to deliver this message to their offspring, but this should be a priority.

Also, is it being taught in schools? If our progressive teachers' unions think sex indoctrination is important in this rapidly-changing society, they should not ignore the importance of smart money handling.

And that should include being made aware of how not to get sucked in by the easy credit being promoted by the financial institutions.

That business of what's your score? is clearly aimed at kids with cell phones.

Post-National??

It seems our painfully progressive politicians on Parliament Hill have decided that we are in a new era--that of the post-national society.

I guess that means no more national distinctions. No more identifying as Canadians, Americans, Mexicans, or anything else. 

They are now ready, along with the United Nations, to declare a homogenized species--nothing to distinguish anyone from anyone else. No more differences of opinion. No more skin color. We are to see each other not as white or black, only grey. All the employed should be willing, nay, eager to give up a portion of what they earn to keep the idle classes afloat. Even gender is up for grabs.

Now, where have we heard something like that before? Could it be the principle of "....from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs"?

If that sounds like Karl Marx, it's because that's who published it first. Marx's great brainstorm was to have the productive segment of society support the unproductive, no questions asked.

It didn't work in the Soviet Union. It didn't work in Cuba and it worked in China only after they gave up and introduced a more-or-less free market economy.

Darwin's theory to the effect that individual initiative is the way all life on this planet has been designed to evolve is correct. That includes humans. Anything else is simply an attempt by unimaginative politicians and immature ideologues to try to mold society to their own specifications. 

Any way you want to look at it, the much- ballyhooed post-national society is guaranteed to eventually turn out to be a post-rational society. 

It's not a theory. All we need do is have another look at the historic evidence.

Saving the Planet:

Apparently, there are 15 coal-fired electrical utilities still functioning here in Canada. 

These are power generating plants that have so far escaped being bombed by Save the Planet green energy warriors. Ontario's Dalton McGinty made a production of destroying Lakeview Hydro back when he led the recently de-activated Ontario Liberals. 

It is uncertain if this is why he was awarded Ottawa's Key to the City by its admiring mayor recently, but it would be unsafe to bet otherwise.

How does Canada's situation stack up against the on-going efforts of the Global Warming and Climate Change arm of the United Nations? Well, here is a sample of the concern of the international community according to stats. 

Statistics show that the European Union has 468 coal fired electric utilities and has slated for production 27 more.

Turkey has 56 coal-fired plants and is planning to launch 93 more.

South Africa has 79 and is building an additional 24.

India has 589 such plants in operation and is committed to add another 446.

The Philippines have 19 coal-fired plants and are building 60 more.

South Korea has 58 such plants and is building an additional 26.

Japan has 90 such plants and is building 45 more.

China has 2,363 coal-fired plants and is building 1,171 more.

So, in total, there are 5,615 coal fired hydro utilities in operation and scheduled to be built around the planet according to the survey. And our heroes on Parliament Hill think they can save the planet by destroying the 15 surviving plants we have in Canada, probably the coldest and most needy of electricity of the lot listed above.

It should also be pointed out that the remaining coal-fired utilities in Canada are mostly located in the flat lands of the Prairie provinces where mountainous terrain suitable for water power is almost non-existent and coal is plentiful.

Is it fair for us to expect the United Nations to pressure the Nobel Committee to hand our gang on Parliament Hill in Ottawa a Save our Earth award?

Note: Numbers posted above do not include existing and projected coal fired plants in the US and Russia, which should be significant.