“British businessmen played a crucial role in the achievement of Canadian Confederation. Without the support of a small but influential group of investors, Confederation would have not occurred in 1867, if at all.” [1] That is how Andrew Smith begins
I confess: I am unable to fathom why Matthew O’Brien holds a serious position writing about economics in The Atlantic. On one hand, he is an acolyte of mainstream Keynesianism to a tee. His playbook is as predictable as the
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The Ontario Finance Minister, Charles Sousa, seems open to the idea of relaxing some of the province’s controls on the market for alcoholic beverages by refusing to rule out the possibility of allowing convenience stores to sell beer, wine and liquor. This
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Reprinted from EnergyTribune.com I speak to many groups of people through the year using my PowerPoint presentations about weather to educate and entertain. Inevitably, at the end of a program, questions about global warming come up. The first thing I say is
Talk about being in the right place at the right time. While my friends watched Cougar Creek and the Bow River overflow and destroy about sixty houses in the process – I sat in sunny Mount Forest sipping a beer
Reprinted from Reason.com Last week, my vacationing family was stopped at not one, but two, internal checkpoints along Interstate 8 in Arizona and California and questioned about our citizenship. I couldn’t help but think of a passage from the late historian Paul
Was the Alberta flood a result of climate change? Of course it was. Once in a while a region like southern Alberta will experience a “100-year flood,” precisely because climate is never stationary. Earth’s climate is a complex energy pattern
Reprinted from DetlevSchlichter.com Earlier this month, in an article for “Project Syndicate” famous American economist Nouriel Roubini joined the chorus of those who declare that the multi-year run up in the gold price was just an almighty bubble, that that bubble has
One of the most frequent criticisms of the idea of unregulated markets is the claim that giant mega-corporations will emerge and run everything with the iron fist of a tyrant. The problems with this analysis are many, including but not
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With Ben Bernanke widely expected not to seek reappointed at the Federal Reserve when his term ends next January 31st, speculation is running rampant as to who his successor will be. Although there are many possibilities the current front-runner is
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Someone once wrote that criticizing economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman is the internet’s favorite pastime. I, too, have engaged in the sport - with no success of changing what Robert Higgs calls the “vulgar Keynesianism” that dirties
Let me disclose right up front that I have not yet completely read David A. Stockman’s seven hundred page bombshell of a book The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in America. It arrived a few days ago and I am
Hershey Canada was recently indicted on charges of collusion and price fixing, being fined $4 million for entering into agreements with Nestlé Canada and Mars Canada to coordinate pricing of chocolate. While Hershey pled guilty to the charges, the other
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Austrian critics of the Fed’s unprecedented money printing since 2009 have sometimes been taken to task for prophesying a hyperinflationary day of reckoning that is still nowhere near in sight. How can the Fed be pumping too much money into
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The story of 10-year-old Sarah Murnaghan is something out of feel-good television drama. Here was a young girl fighting for her life as her parents made a desperate plea for public sympathy. Murnaghan needed a lung transplant as a result
Recent reports indicate that the employment situation for young people in Canada is even more dire than that of the general population. A study by CIBC found that 420,000 aged 15 to 24 are neither employed nor in school, and
For the last few days, story of one Komal Ganatra has been making headlines in India. Her dad, now retired, earned his living as a school teacher in India. Five years back, she was married off to an Indian immigrant
Now that the housing market in the U.S. is beginning to recover from the crisis which began nearly six long years ago, people are finally becoming interested in building and buying new homes again. The only trouble is, there seems
Reprinted from the Freeman Is Coca-Cola being a “conscious capitalist” or is the company capitulating? A headline on the advertising and technology blog Ad:Tech prompted the question for me. “Why Coca-Cola will voluntarily stop marketing to kids,” it read. “In an entirely
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Last Thursday the Bank of Canada warned against the obvious: condos are overpriced and this poses a risk to the whole economy. The BoC singled out the Toronto market, noting that the country’s largest city also hosts the largest number
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