William Watson explains at Financial Post: We will need Trussonomics.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

If subsidies change behaviour, as their proponents clearly believe they do,
so must taxes and the rising cost of regulation

The Nobel-winning novelist Doris Lessing once wrote that “In politics it is easier to be mad unnoticed than anywhere else.” Of course, she was writing about Communist Party politics in what was then Southern Rhodesia during World War II, not leadership campaigns in the 21st-century British Tory party. But the goings-on of the various factions that make up the Tory party have been at least tinged with madness, if not steeped in it. And it is not going unnoticed. The whole world is watching, as the chant goes, especially the bond market.

The pity is that fine and ever more necessary ideas have been caught in all the loopiness and, guilty by association, are being dumped in the ash bin at the very time they are needed most. What for the next 20 years will be branded “Trussonomics” is in its essence simply tried and true common sense: ever rising tax rates and ever more intrusive regulation, which is what western countries have these days, are not and never have been the road to high and rising living standards.

Now, strangely, these libertarian ideas are being categorized as “populist,” the supposedly idiot beliefs of the great and ignorant unwashed. There may be places in the world where libertarianism is populist — Wyoming, maybe, rural New Hampshire, anywhere that lived under Soviet Communism — but in this country and in the United Kingdom such ideas are best loved by the not very numerous readers of such bricks as Friedrich Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty, which according to Amazon weighs 1.68 pounds. Their most effective European exponent, Margaret Thatcher, who supposedly carried that book in her purse, making it a truly lethal weapon if swung with sufficient force, sold this set of ideas on the basis that “There is no alternative,” hardly the most appealing brand labelling.

Many Canadians are in some ways instinctive libertarians.

Why are we paying for the prime minister’s groceries, many will wonder — not his state dinners and receptions but his ordinary family groceries? Why are the Governor General’s airplane meals so expensive? Could she not settle for the dried-out trail mix the rest of us are served while flying? Why does Ottawa think (see Matthew Lau’s article elsewhere on this page) “people who menstruate” — the people formerly known as women — should have free female hygiene products, plus installed receptacles for them, provided in every bathroom in federal jurisdiction — men’s, women’s and other?

In each case, the populist answer, though simple, is right: He should pay for his own family groceries. She should eat the airplane meals the rest of us eat. And Ottawa should stay out of the bathrooms of the nation (as an earlier Trudeau might have said). To be sure, more subtle and sophisticated reasoning can and often does lead especially very highly-educated people to conclude that such answers are hopelessly, horribly wrong. In these more refined circles “populist” is a way of saying “simple-minded” and “unseemly.”

It is true that Trussonomics, as proposed by its namesake, was flawed in very avoidable ways. If you win a leadership contest, it’s a sign of weakness, not strength, to exclude rivals from your cabinet (or, attention Mr. Poilievre, shadow cabinet). If the spending hikes and tax cuts you want could cause reasonable people to worry about the resulting government debt, you should not close down a watchdog whose job it is to track such things. And you must tell your cabinet where you are heading and also prepare the public — a lesson learned in this country in 1981 when finance minister Allan MacEachen sprang fiscal surprises in a budget that, several weeks later, had to be walked back, not long before MacEachen himself was walked over to External Affairs, as it then was. Ever since, budget secrecy be damned, federal budgets have been telegraphed well in advance.

In Ottawa, as the budget approaches, small dogs must be kept indoors
lest they be frightened by popping of trial balloons going off like fireworks.

But though the Trussonomics package was badly wrapped, its contents remain sound. People do respond to incentives. If you tax income too much, you reduce the incentive to earn and report it honestly. If you regulate people too much, you induce them to spend their money and time getting round regulations, including by doing the regulated activity in jurisdictions (not yours) where it is regulated less. Pile on taxes and rules, and lawyers and lobbyists grow rich while invention, investment and innovation languish or relocate.

It’s sometimes argued that people aren’t as responsive to economic incentives as economists claim, so taxing them and raising their regulatory costs won’t discourage the animal spirits that impel them to constructive action. But those offering this argument are invariably inveterate subsidizers, who would encourage all manner of activity they deem socially worthy by subsidizing it, taxing it less or lightening its regulatory load.

But you can’t have it both ways. Subsidies that don’t change people’s behaviour are just ways of getting money to friends. But if subsidies change behaviour, as their proponents clearly believe they do, so must taxes and the rising cost of regulation.

Ms. Truss may walk off into history. Trussonomics our over-taxed and over-regulated societies desperately need.

Footnote from Issues and Insights: Biden Has Unleashed The Regulatory Leviathan: Report

The Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) just this morning released its hugely valuable report called “10,000 Commandments,” which is a compendium of the regulatory state. In it, CEI Vice President for Policy Clyde Wayne Crews lays out the terrible truth about Biden’s regulatory zeal.

The first thing you have to understand about federal regulation is how massive it already is, with compliance costs that total more than $1.9 trillion a year.

That’s bigger than Canada’s entire GDP. It’s bigger, in fact, than all but seven nations in the world. It works out to almost $15,000 per household.

And it is growing at a ferocious pace. From 1995 to last year, regulators issued a total of 114,821 new rules.

The cost of complying with this mountain of mandates is on top of the $6.3 trillion the feds spent this year, which means the true cost of government equals roughly a third of the nation’s economy.

Conrad Black observes in National Post:  Canada, the U.S. and U.K. have become the new ‘sick man’ of the world.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

The three principal predominantly English-speaking Atlantic countries (the United States, United Kingdom and Canada) are now “the sick man” of the world. For almost all of the 19th century and up to the First World War, the Ottoman Empire was reviled as ”the sick man of Europe,” and its leader was habitually referred to as ”the Abominable Porte.” These disparagements proved premature when put to the test in the First World War. The Ottoman Empire outlasted the Russian Empire in the war and the Turks threw the British, French and Commonwealth forces into the sea with 220,000 casualties in the debacle at Gallipoli in 1915-16, the greatest and near-terminal defeat in the career of Winston Churchill. It is also very premature, of course, to underestimate the three leading English-speaking countries, but as our longest-serving prime minister, W. L. Mackenzie King, said of his own career at its low point in 1930, we are all “passing through the valley of humiliation.”

In Britain, Prime Minister Liz Truss and then-chancellor of the exchequer Kwasi Kwarteng presented a bold and imaginative budget. Facing double-digit inflation and negligible economic growth, they instituted a cap on energy price increases to the public by having the state pick up the tab for natural gas and electricity price increases above a designated level, reverse a planned six-point increase in the corporate tax and reduce the maximum income tax by five points. Unfortunately and inexplicably, they produced no accompanying proposals for substantial government cost reductions. Normally, ambitious proposals for tax reductions are accompanied by elaborate estimates of the resulting loss of revenue being substantially regained by increased revenue from heightened consumer demand and the greater transactional velocity of money. Of course, all such estimates are essentially throwing a dart at a board, but they are necessary to shut up opinionated and dogmatic economists, especially high-tax leftists and authoritarian regulators.

Economics is essentially psychology and Grade 3 arithmetic.  Truss and Kwarteng
got the psychology right, but in failing to produce any arithmetic at all,
they left themselves wide open to a deluge of skeptical ridicule.

The official Opposition, the Labour party, now a Corbynite gaggle of unregenerate Marxists hiding behind their relatively innocuous leader, Keir Starmer, the socialistic hypocrites at the International Monetary Fund and the sprawling apparatus of the European Union, which is still wheezing with rage over Brexit, all pounced on the budget like famished wolves. As always happens when the conventional wisdom is stoked up and unopposed, even the most ludicrously implausible sources of any worthwhile opinion on the subject, U.S. President Joe Biden in this case, joined the torrent of brickbats.

 Truss did not handle it very convincingly, and her chancellor was confidently informing the international financial media in Washington last week that he was firm in his position and his views and was “not going anywhere,” when his boss folded like a $3 suitcase and gave him the order of the boot. Even Starmer, who is no Benjamin Disraeli or Winston Churchill as a parliamentary wit, got off some pretty good shots, adapting the famous statement of Margaret Thatcher to a beleaguered party conference in the early days of her radical government: “U-turn if you want to. The lady’s not for turning.” It appeared to justify the French media’s sarcastic reflection on the difference between the Iron Lady and the “Iron Weathervane.” She has only been prime minister for six weeks, and though it would seem almost unimaginably absurd for even the querulous and treacherous backbenchers of the British Tory party to disembark another leader so quickly after they filled the space between former prime minister Boris Johnson’s shoulder blades with knives, that is exactly what happened. Following a string of cabinet departures and internal party dissent, Truss announced her resignation on Thursday. Meanwhile, the separatist Scottish National Party is now leading the Conservatives in the polls and the formerly terrorist-tinged Sinn Féin, the parent of the Irish Republican Army, is settling into the government of Northern Ireland. As the new monarch enters upon his reign, the political condition of his principal realm could scarcely be worse. It will probably get better because further deterioration is hard to imagine, but much will depend on whether the Tories can mount a historic comeback.

Most Canadians are somewhat aware of the debacle in Washington. Since his election, President Biden has maintained a war without mercy on the U.S. oil and gas industry, while simultaneously disparaging the House of Saud as moral pariahs. A recent report from the Committee to Unleash Prosperity found that, given rising prices, if the Trump administration’s energy policies had been maintained, the United States would be producing two- to three-million more barrels a day of oil than it currently is, which would have pushed down global oil prices. Russian President Vladimir Putin essentially applied the increased revenues from his higher-priced oil exports to finance his war of aggression in Ukraine, which the United States is now admirably spending tens of billions of dollars to assist the Ukrainians in resisting. Because Biden is intimidated by the green terror that he mindlessly espouses like an eco-robot on autopilot, he was reduced to calling upon the Saudi crown prince, metaphorical cap in hand, and asking for production increases. Instead, the Saudis, with well-earned disdain for the government of the world’s most powerful nation, reduced production further, leaving Biden’s bumbling entourage talking about suspending armament sales to the Saudis. This would only make matters worse by giving scores of billions of dollars of defence contracts to our enemies. Even great powers, when their foreign policy is based on idiocy, can be, in U.S. President Richard Nixon’s famous expression, “a pitiful, helpless giant.” Five thousand illegal migrants a day are pouring across the southern border and Russia, even as it blasts Ukraine, is representing the U.S. in an insane effort to revive the disastrous nuclear agreement with Iran that Barack Obama negotiated and Donald Trump cancelled. None of it makes any sense.

Canada — which, as historian W. L. Morton said, is ”strong only in moderation and governable only by compromise” — has never in its 155 years as an autonomous country come close to the shambles of government that has been unfolding in Washington, or the sequence of fiascos that have afflicted the current era of Conservative government in Britain. Our comparative decorum should not lead any Canadian to complacency, though. We have spent seven years wallowing helplessly in a mindless fixation on climate, Indigenous and gender issues. Canada is a treasure trove of resources that we are afraid to utilize and we are somnambulating in the world like a toked-up Peter Pan.

Based on history, all three countries will pull themselves together quite soon and resume their rightful places among the most respected nations in the world.

Stephen Moore writes at Washington Examiner Biden’s destroying the economy. Is it intentional?  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Everywhere I go, people are mystified about President Joe Biden’s economic agenda. So few of the policies comport with basic common sense that I’m asked the same question over and over: Is Biden intentionally trying to take a wrecking ball to the economy?

Is this all part of some diabolical plan, the “great reset,” to end our system of free market capitalism and replace it with some form of big-government socialism?

Biden keeps saying that he wants to be an historic president who will “transition” the country into a new worker’s paradise where no one uses fossil fuels or electricity or cars and equality is paramount, ahead of growth and prosperity. Is he taking us there with no regard for the collateral damage to America?

My belief is that, no, I don’t think this is an intentional, nefarious Dr. Evil-type plot.

But if this were a scheme to burn down the village in order to rebuild it,
Biden and his administration are doing a great job of it.

Here are seven Biden administration steps to undermine an economy and a society from within. They will all sound familiar with the president’s policies since he took office 21 months ago.

1. Dismantle the nation’s energy supply. We get 70% of our energy from fossil fuels. Biden has declared war on American oil and gas, making us more dependent on our enemies for our basic energy needs.

2. Don’t enforce the border. Biden is letting hundreds of thousands of potential criminals, terrorists, welfare recipients, and enemies of the United States into our country through a porous southern border with Mexico. Immigration is good, but it must be orderly and regulated.

3. Devalue the nation’s currency through inflation. Inflation is up nearly 15% since Biden came into office. Inflation is a means to erode the value of a currency.

4. Destroy the nation’s finances by running up the debt by multiple trillions of dollars of debt. No president in modern times has so recklessly pushed our nation into debt as rapidly as Biden through his $4 trillion in spending paid for with red ink.

5. Divide rather than unite the nation. Rich versus poor, black versus white, gay versus straight, rural versus urban. Biden promised unity. Instead, he pits groups against each other. This is the identity politics of the Left that is the opposite of “e pluribus unum.”

6. Dumb down and indoctrinate our children with anti-American propaganda in the schools and media. And allowing teacher unions and left-wing activists to take over the curriculum with anti-American propaganda. It is the opposite of nurturing patriotism and love of country.

7. Decriminalize a lot. Let criminals onto the streets. End bail. Empty the prisons. Let minor crimes go unpunished. Biden’s policies favor criminals over victims. It’s a scene out of a Batman movie.

Are these policies intentional or simply completely misguided? I don’t know. But does it matter? Either way, our country is in grave peril.

Zachary Stieber writes at Epoch Times 47 New Biden Administration Defendants Named in Government–Big Tech Censorship Lawsuit.  Excerpts in italic with my bolds.

Nearly 50 new government defendants have been added to the lawsuit that alleges the government induced censorship of state officials and others on social media.

The second amended complaint in the case, Missouri v. Biden, includes six new agencies, bringing the total to 13, and 41 new individual defendants, bringing the total to 54.

Altogether, 67 officials or agencies are accused of violating plaintiffs’ First Amendment rights by participating in a “censorship enterprise” through pressuring Big Tech firms like Facebook, Google, and Twitter to take action against users offering alleged misinformation.

Evidence backing the claims has been produced in discovery, including exchanges between White House officials and Meta, Facebook’s parent company and messages showing meetings between administration officials and the firms.

The new defendants include the FBI; former White House senior COVID-19 adviser Andrew Slavitt; Dana Remus, counsel to President Joe Biden; Elvis Chan, an FBI special agent based in San Francisco; Janell Muhammed, deputy digital director at the Department of Health and Human Services; Allison Snell, an official at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency; the Food and Drug Administration (FDA); the State Department; and Mark Robbins, interim executive director of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission.

One or more of the Big Tech firms that were subpoenaed in the case identified the officials as possibly communicating with them on content moderation relating to “COVID-19 misinformation,” the New York Post’s story about Hunter Biden’s laptop, the administration’s since-disbanded Disinformation Governance Board, and/or “election security, integrity, outcomes, and/or public confidence in election outcomes (not to include issues of foreign interference or related issues).”

Slavitt was named because emails show he was in communication with Facebook regarding the combating of alleged misinformation. The messages show that Facebook was committed to censoring and de-emphasizing posts that were “departing from the government’s messaging on vaccines,” plaintiffs said. Slavitt also called for Twitter to ban Alex Berenson, an independent journalist, previously released messages show.

Muhammed, meanwhile, was in touch with Facebook to ask the company to take down pages and accounts that were allegedly misrepresenting themselves as representing the government. “Absolutely,” one of the Facebook employees responded.

Other discovery suggests the FDA “has participated in federally-induced censorship of private speech on social media about questions of vaccine safety and efficacy, among other subjects,” plaintiffs said.

The agencies that were added to the case did not respond to requests for comment.

U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty, a Trump appointee overseeing the case, recently ordered defendants named in earlier complaints to comply with demands, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, a top medical adviser to Biden. The new documents do not include any more information from Fauci or the White House press secretary’s office.

Footnote: 

From Your news: Biden Admin Showered Millions On Government’s ‘Misinformation’ Czars After 2020 Election

The four groups in question – Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO), the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, and social media analytics firm Graphika – comprise the “Election Integrity Partnership,” which exists as a ‘concierge-like’ service for federal agencies such as Homeland’s Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and State’s Global Engagement Center to flag online content for censorship or monitoring by Big Tech using a “ticket” system.

Unsurprisingly, the head of Stanford’s Internet Observatory is a Clinton donor who previously served as Facebook’s Head of Security – while the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public is largely funded by the Knight Foundation, whose board exclusively contributes to Democrat or Neocon entities. 

Meanwhile, the Biden administration empowered three liberal groups to file tickets seeking censorship; the Democratic National Committee, Common Cause and the NAACP.