Kill the Admin State, Salt The Earth Beneath It, Eliminate Income Tax, and the Middle and Working Classes Will Soar

Be like Cato: Carthago Delenda Est. Never stop saying it.

The income tax literally disincentivizes and discourages productivity and innovation.

Publius on X

You can read the plan here

There has been some argument in my house about Trump’s tariffs on Canada, and indeed the rest of the world. I’m on the American side; why on earth should the Americans pay for everything? Because they do. They pay for Europe’s defence, they allow every single country to tariff American products while allowing their goods in for pennies. When anyone, anywhere is in trouble, who do they call? The Yanks. Where do the pleas of all the desperate people all over the world land? America. Who did the Israeli captives hope for? Trump and the Americans. (Actually just Trump. They didn’t think that the Biden people would lift a finger. Which they didn’t.)

Please explain why these countries below, numbering 550 million people, cannot defend themselves?

Why can’t they defend themselves? They are broke.

The following represents $150 billion in missed opportunity in the last FIVE years. Canada is so broke, it is broke-ass broke; it is a shriveling carbuncle on the American economy. We send 80% of our exports to you because we are TOO DAMNED LAZY to develop our own country.

If we had built those projects, Canada would be rich, the middle class would be crackling along, creativity would have soared and we would actually be proud. No one is proud of Canada except for the people paid to bloviate or who hope to be paid to bloviate, and those too stupid to bloviate. The rest of us are sullen and angry and so frustrated we don’t know what to do with ourselves.

But no. Climate Change. Look, I am sorry to say this, but anyone who “believes” in climate change being somehow catastrophic is stupid, malignant or has not done the required reading. Which means lazy. Which means childlike. There is no there there. Climate alarmism is nonsense, it is bullshit, it is utter crap made up by subsidized kids looking for ‘significance’ and an endless supply of taxpayer dollars. The science is far too new to be reliable, there are thousands of real (not NGO) scientists in opposition to it and the policy implications are so vast we are looking at a new feudalism. Anyone promoting climate change is unserious.

Childhood is where we are. Canada is the only country in the Western Hemisphere which exacts a crippling carbon tax. And this:

The above is a perfect illustration of vanity, of a detachment from reality. And the only way people can detach from reality is that they are subsidized by the Americans. This means the Heartland people, the Flyover people. Those subsidies to the world added to a massive, unsustainable, insane, debt of thirty-seven trillion, created a giant fuzzy rainbow coloured cloud inhabited by perpetual children built by ghastly people like Samantha Powers, Al Gore, Hillary Clinton, and their legion of sick, larcenous, pedophile, supporters, the ferociously, stupid women on the east coat of America, the idiots at all the Ivies, and the two million federal workers who are about to be reduced by, I wish, 50%.

This goes for Europe too. I worked in Europe for ten years. The mockery, the contempt, the sneering about Americans was terrible. “Pencil-necked turkey farmers”, memorably said a young Viscount I should not have dated, befriended, hired. His father, an Earl, was in Thatcher’s cabinet, so he heard that at home, at the ceaseless drinks parties of that class.

I used to have to introduce myself when working for Time Inc., as Elizabeth-Nickson- Canadian, at which point eyes would soften to pity, and they would say effectively, “I’m so glad (you’re not American).” You know what that is? Envy. Guilt. The sulking of a dependent child. You subsidize these people.

When the head of whatever bonkers committee that decides the future in the EU retired in tears, he was crying because it was the end of his dream, that Americans would continue to pay for everything, now and forever more. “Our dream is dying!” he choked. And one of those appalling women who scold us continuously from their golden perch, got up to hug him. How sweet. Actual humanity from reductionist thieves. Look, I grew up with rich kids, the kind of ‘old money’ silly women on the socials slaver over. (We were just ‘old’ so my eye was jaundiced). Exactly the same behavior, ladidadida, cloud cuckoo land. Few ended well.

Let’s do some math! First:

The private sector worker pays the government employee. Hey, let’s reverse that, and see how fast the Admin state dies.

And this!

We are pathetic. We are an exhausted sigh of a country. We live off America. You defend us. We whine. We are in the worst decline in 40 years. A secret RCMP report warns that Canadians may revolt once they realize how broke they are. Why? Our leadership is so bad it emits the foul stench of hell. Mark Carney, who will be appointed prime minister in a few days, is a literal demon, raping public wealth wherever he goes. He is king of public debt. Every country he has invaded with his “new banking paradigm” chokes out warnings about his pillaging of workers rights and the environment. Our media is too stupid to report that. No, he is green! He is a fiscal genius! He will save us! No, he will sell us to BlackRock and China while subsidizing what he will call “sustainable jobs” which will end when the subsidy ends.

Our fourth quarter GDP plummeted again, to -1.4% for the average Canadian. “Growth” was actually .06%, which is probably a lie, massaged by some stinking dishonest bureaucrat to make himself look better. All the growth was from inflation - things costing more - and financial services - people refinancing, flipping their houses, and selling out to foreign (read Chinese and other criminal enterprises) investors.

Europe is just as bad, if not worse. Double some of those tariffs for Europe. They are a joke. Their welfare state is collapsing, they have destroyed their productive sector (like Canada) and they’ve imported so many uneducated violent Muslims and Africans that women are not safe on the streets, and the centers of once great cities are now garbage heaps of desperate homeless whom they ignore.

“Politicians in Europe are using the JD Vance and Trump external enemy excuse to disguise the existential problem of a system that is crumbling.

The statist nightmare built around what politicians call “welfare state” has proven to be a subterfuge to multiply bureaucracy and create a dependent subclass.

The welfare state was never sustainable but was created as an affordable luxury that rich economies could finance with strong economic growth and a solid productive sector. However, European governments overlooked the necessity of fostering economic growth and productivity to finance the welfare state. Furthermore, as left-wing populism permeated all segments of the European political landscape, politicians started to include more and more so-called “rights,” which became entitlement costs and subsidies, in a trend that led Europe to forget to create wealth and focus entirely on extractive and confiscatory policies.

We have seen a gradual destruction of the productive sector, asphyxiated by constantly raising taxes and bureaucratic and regulatory limitations, while government budgets expanded without control.”

I mean really, how dare they? What a joke last weekend’s “We’re gonna replace AmeriKKKa in Ukraine summit”. After the self-congratulation at Downing Street, the poisoned dwarf that is Zelenskyy was carted off to be praised by King Charles’s silly self. It was the posturing of vain, stupid people who talked big, and folded within days, saying, actually we need America to pay.

Europe’s problem is they need to go to war with Russia because otherwise, they are well and truly screwed. War is good business for Old Europe. They need a massive bond issue to float their ridiculous economies, stealing from the future, again. Like Canadians, if Europe knew how broke it was, all the administration buildings would be set on fire with the bureaucrats still in them. That’s how bad it is. They started the war with Ukraine by breaking a promise they made in 1998 not to expand NATO. And they never fulfilled the Minsk Treaty. They effected a color revolution on Putin’s doorstep in 2014 and deposed an elected President because he was pro-Russia. They appointed an actor, Zelenskyy, as President. Western elites started this war. European bureaucrats, USAID personnel and politicians are neck deep in the blood of 1.5 million dead.

The administrative state kills.

Don’t believe me? How about Jeffrey Sachs?

After their hissy fit about Ukraine, Germany is in deep recession and it was the only healthy economy in the EU. Martin Armstrong:

" Because they all are facing the collapse of the European Union. The debt is just unbelievable. They never consolidated. Between Covid, Climate Change and sanctions on Russia, the German economy has shrunk . . . 3% to 5%. The economic growth (of the EU) is appalling. Europe is falling, and this is why they need war. So, they are backing Zelensky.”

“In this report, I gathered a bunch of headlines: London Financial Times, what’s the headline? ‘America is Now the Enemy of the West.’ This is why Trump is saying ‘We are out.’ Zelensky has admitted that 58% of the $350 billion the US gave him is missing. You cut the funding, and you are going to find out the truth.

Trump should cut every single penny. Bring it all out.”

On Friday, the Germans announced a $1 trillion spend to rebuild their industrial base and their defence. The whole sensible world collapsed in hysterical laugher. Where’s that money going to come from you effete spoiled morons? You stripped every productive asset, regulated every business into bankruptcy and created a productive class that, I don’t know, what do they do with themselves all day? Watch TikTok? You gave more money to Russia for oil than you spent fighting Russia in Ukraine. Bring back Bismarck.

The following is the only hope of the world. The only hope.

Fire half of them. Cut the income tax in half to start. Tariff everything and everyone. Institute a consumption tax. I recommend 22%. For every new regulation, cut ten, and cut half of the ones already operating. Every regulator destroys 550,000 jobs in his professional lifetime.The pain they cause is immeasurable.

Look, again, I am radically simplifying. Tax and tariff policy is deliberately obfuscating in order to make people give up trying to understand. Try to read anything on Tarris’s from Bloomberg or CNBC and it’s fluffy gobblety-gook, designed to confuse. Try to find out much any other country tariffs the U.S. in the mainstream news. They are not on the side of Americans.

I once lived in a country that had no income tax. It was one of the richest in the world. When I moved there, I was a leftie and sharply critical, looking for weaknesses. I found none. I was staying with one of my oldest, dearest friends, and over a period of years, he tutored me in the benefits of libertarianism. Let me tell you the car rides to work were fiery.

But eventually, I relented. Bermuda was 66% black, and everyone had a job, a house and a car. The consumption tax was 22%. Not on food. It was racially peaceful, happy even. There was a lot of mixing and intermarrying (that was not virtue signalling). There was one street behind the main town that held a handful of alcoholics and drug addicts but that’s it. Everyone was required to have basic health insurance, that they paid for. I paid $66 a month. You could buy American health insurance which was concierge level for $5,500 per family. All the kids who wanted to, white and black went to university. There was one “rich” neighbourhood near the airport, the usual empty hulking souless collection of trophy homes, but mostly the country was organized into villages, which were (I am sorry to use this word) diverse in both color and house size.

I tell you what it didn’t have: a permanent bureaucracy and politicians. Most of the politicians had actual jobs in the actual economy, which meant they weren’t detached from the consequences of their decisions. It also meant the government wasn’t expensive. It was more church lady than anything else. Practical first, insisting on the ‘raising up’ of the community second. Yes, there were the usual committees and standards enforcers, but they worked with you, not against you. Why? Because they were your neighbours. The government was not rich, it was not a target of scammers and thieves who make out like bandits while collecting a government salary.

Bermuda is not Caribbean but it is very like, and a visit to any Caribbean island for comparison is, for the sensitive, soul destroying. It is a nice little case study that should be taught in every School of Public and Business Administration on the planet.

But, no, we are not taught practicalities anymore. Everyone is an “artist”. Everyone is “spiritual” and above things like budgets and job multipliers. Energy comes from sunbeams and the zephyrs of the north.

Let’s be like Bermuda. Everywhere. This is how.

Fire half of them. All? No, we need administrators. We don’t need social engineers. We need mathy people to measure actual outcomes so that we know what’s happening. We need sensible regulation. The regulatory structure I am most familiar with - forestry regulation - is so cloud cuckoo land, it is a wonder the whole west coast doesn’t lie in cinders. And water? The destruction of the American west’s water system - which was one of the wonders of the world - is just… tragic. I can’t even think about it. I imagine it’s the same across all the agencies. Of the Department of Education’s budget, only 10% is spent on the schools. Where on earth do $232 billion go? Kill it. Now. Their outcomes are worse than tragic. They have failed across the board.

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The income tax is a wholly negative force in everyone’s life.

First of all, consumption taxes are more virtuous than income taxes. It means government revenue prospers only when citizens prosper. As my friend pointed out, with no income tax, the virtuous kid can work, save, and start a business, by denying himself treats. Again, simple illustration. Trust me, I could write a 40 page policy paper with 40 pages of citations, that you would have to pay yourself to read, but this is its precis:

When Trump instituted tariffs on aluminum, the largest aluminum producer in the U.S. restarted idle production lines. These are good jobs, family supporting jobs. Jobs with multipliers across every community in the region.

At the same time, an aluminum plant in Quebec, which was selling subsidized aluminum into the American market, closed. Quebec was cheating. We cheat with our deals by subsidizing our industries. We cheat with softwood. We cheat with anything we can. As does Europe, as does India. It is the opposite of virtue. If Canada and Europe had not shut down their industries over ‘climate change’, they would not need to cheat to sell their product. They would be able to use it that aluminum for example and create jobs that would mean most of the democratic west would not be desperately broke.

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Tariffs on American goods is how every other country makes up for its poor decisions as was made clear when the US Trade deficit surged to a record ahead of Trump’s decisions. They were getting in while the getting was good. The U.S. imposing reciprocal tariffs meant their gravy train was about to end.

Imposing tariffs on foreign goods means a $700 billion add to the U.S. budget. It ushers in an entirely virtuous cycle. It brings back badly needed manufacturing to the U.S. It means workers with good pay, jobs which have a multiplier of 3-5 throughout the economy. It means more demand for American resources; the average mining job has a multiplier of 7 jobs. These are not influencer jobs or McJobs or jobs in moving money around, they are real jobs where people can build families and a future. Cut a trillion off the bloated destructive evil of the administrative state through DOGE and firing 1/3 of federal and state workers, $700 billion in tariffs, and lo and behold you have a functioning economy. Your deficit has been eliminated. You are no longer Big Daddy for failures across the planet. Countries like Canada and all of the E.U. and Britain are forced to grow up and develop.

The rest? Funded by a consumption tax.

Easy. The end. You’re welcome.

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Elizabeth Nickson was trained as a reporter at the London bureau of Time Magazine. She became European Bureau Chief of LIFE magazine in its last years of monthly publication, and during that time, acquired the rights to Nelson Mandela’s memoir before he was released from Robben Island. She went on to write for Harper’s Magazine, the Guardian, the Observer, the Independent, the Sunday Telegraph, the Sunday Times Magazine, the Telegraph, the Globe and Mail and the National Post. Her first book The Monkey Puzzle Tree was an investigation of the CIA MKULTRA mind control program and was published by Bloomsbury and Knopf Canada. Her next book, Eco-Fascists,,How Radical Environmentalists Are Destroying Our Natural Heritage, was a look at how environmentalism, badly practiced, is destroying the rural economy and rural culture in the U.S. and all over the world. It was published by Adam Bellow at Harper Collins US. She is a Senior Fellow at the Frontier Center for Public Policy, fcpp.org. You can read in depth policy papers about various elements of the environmental junta here: https://independent.academia.edu/ElizabethNickson.

Her essay on the catastrophic failings of Canada's CBC is included in Michael Walsh’s Against the Corporate Media, 42 Ways the Press Hates You.

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