It is not just empires that fall
Justin Trudeau is in trouble politically so he has resorted to the tried and true tactic of promising free money in the form of Universal basic income. I first discussed this in September of last year and recently I have noticed the push for UBI has become relentless. Social media is full of people extolling the virtues of UBI. They promote studies that show UBI has only positive benefits. These studies are similar to most studies on just about any left wing topic. Researchers are paid to produce a conclusion which they do by skewing their experiments or the data.
The gas lighting by Canadian academia continues. They carefully selected their subjects to get the answer the liberals paid for. I bet the researchers were just happy that for once they did not need to prostitute themselves for climate change. The net result is however the same. This is fraudulent research done solely to support a political candidate and ideology.
Most of the studies on UBI involve carefully selected small groups and I don’t dispute on a small scale UBI will benefit a small select group at the expense of all others. I know this with certainty because the city of Ottawa exists. Supporting a small group of leaches is detrimental but survivable. Trying this on a large scale will destroy the country. It was one of the things that contributed to the fall of Rome.
These conquests were mostly bad for ordinary Romans. The wheat from Egypt and many other newly conquered regions drove down the price of grain. That impoverished average Roman farmers. Left landless, they went to the capital. Roman politicians dealt with this by creating a giant welfare scheme in which once productive, hardworking citizens were placed on the dole. Romans devised a term for this group which soon numbered in the hundreds of thousands—a third of the total population of the city. They were referred to as the mobile vulgus. It is from this expression that we get the term mob. Lacking work and with much time on their hands, they gravitated towards the politicians who could provide them with money or occasional employment, and many became hired thugs employed by these demagogic politicians. This led to violent division on Rome’s streets.
Rome caused an internal problem by flooding the local market with grain produced in a country with lower labor costs (slaves). This produced high unemployment and the sate slowly bankrupt itself paying people not to work. So to summarize The Empire was defeated by free trade and UBI. Canada has dozens of free trade agreements with low labor cost countries and we will soon have UBI. Can you predict where this story line is going?
Of course it took a lot more than free trade and UBI to destroy Rome. Multiculturalism was also a big factor. Liberal Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau gave Canada multiculturalism. Conservative Prime minister Brian Mulroney started free trade which has since been expanded by successive Liberal and Conservative Prime Ministers. Now Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau wants to give us UBI.
It took more than 50 years and several Prime Ministers but Canada is now on the cusp of finishing the perfect trifecta of destruction. Both parties had a hand in this. From my perspective not a single Prime Minister in my life time has done anything but erode Canada. You might not agree that there has been a multi-decade campaign to destroy the country but stop and ask yourself this. If they were trying to destroy the country, what would they do that was different?
