Stolen elections… suicidal empathy… net zero lunacy… the plight of western civilization in general…
Nothing was off the table during our recent conversation with elizabeth nickson, author of the widely read Welcome to Absurdistan letter, right here on Substack.
Elizabeth was trained at the London Bureau of Time Magazine, where she spent seven years, ending her stint there as European Bureau Chief of LIFE Magazine. She published a novel, The Monkey Puzzle Tree with Knopf and Bloomsbury, and wrote for the Telegraph, the Globe and Mail, Harper’s Magazine, the Sunday Times Magazine, British Vogue, the Independent, the Guardian, the Observer.
A fiercely independent thinker, in 2012 Elizabeth published Eco-Fascists, How Radical Environmentalists are Destroying Our Natural Heritage, with Adam Bellow at Harper Collins, New York.
As you can see, a well-qualified person to help us gain some insights into what’s going on north of the 49th parallel.
And so for an unhurried hour or so, from one “End of the Americas” to the other – Elizabeth up in western Canada… your antipodean editor down here in Argentina – we delved into the starkly diverging trajectories of our respective nations.
Truly, the analysis reads like a Tale of two Americas: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…”
Elizabeth explained how, less than two decades ago, Canadians were on near economic footing with their US neighbors to the immediate south… only to watch their good fortune since squandered through a mixture of mass political ineptitude and, Elizabeth believes, a well-orchestrated plan, executed by nefarious forces – both at home and abroad – to hollow out their once proud nation.
For many of our friends watching the events unfolding up north, it’s been a long and painful slide...and a costly one, too.
Loonie Lunacy
On the back of a robust resource bull market, and a brief stretch of not-entirely-disastrous management, the Canadian dollar hit parity with the Greenback in 2007, peaking around 1.00–1.06 USD a few years later. Since then, under the blindfolded captaincy of Mr. Trudeau & Co., it has slid around 30%, and today trades at barely 75 cents on the US dollar.
The widening disparity shows up in GDP per capita, too. Adjusted for purchasing power parity (PPP), Canada came to within 8% of per capita GDP in the US during the late 2000s–early 2010s… before plummeting 21%. Today, it’s less than three-quarters that of the States… and the gap is widening.
Indeed, if Mr. Trump got his “joking, not-joking” wish, and Canada really did become the 51st US state tomorrow, it would rank in the bottom handful of states in terms of per capita GDP… somewhere between Oklahoma and Arkansas.
And yet, rather than reversing course… doing less of the things that sent the economy in the wrong direction in the first place… and more of the things that generate business, drive growth and raise hard-working people’s standards of living… the government is doubling down on the broken policies of a failed socialist agenda.
Elizabeth’s reasons for why this is all happening will surely shock some readers… and come as no surprise to others.
All the while, the clamoring mob in the bought-and-paid-for press clap and cheer…
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Downside-Up World
The story of corruption, central planning and Big Government Knows Best arrogance will be familiar to our long suffering Argentine readers, who endured as much and more over the past 75+ years. Indeed, what the Argentine political cast – la casta – doesn’t know about how to destroy a perfectly healthy economy is barely worth knowing.
From price controls to economic depression… rampant money printing to hyperinflation… bread and circuses to social justice… the Long Marxist March through the academies to state-sponsored propaganda mills in the press… it’s all been tried, failed, and tried again down here on The Pampas.
And yet, nothing in this life is forever.
Empires… currencies… political theories and the useful idiots who spout them… all come to the end of their rope in good time.
After electing the world’s first “anarcho-capitalist” president – one who believes in “crackpot” theories like sound money, balanced budgets and free markets – Argentina has experienced a turnaround that is nothing short of remarkable.
Inflation has collapsed by ~90%, from a ruinous 300+% per year to a (still too high, but heading in the right direction) 30% per year.
Economic growth has gone from negative -1.6%, and fast declining… to among the strongest economies in the western hemisphere, growing at a rate of 4.4% last year… and projected to add 4% again this year.
And the latest data shows the all-important poverty rate has dropped from a high of 52%, right after Sr. Milei took office, to 28% and rapidly falling today…
Of course, one swallow does not make a spring, and it may be too early to tell how this all ends… but the future of two Americas is taking shape right before us, for those with eyes to see.
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Eco-Fascists is now available as a paperback here.
You can view The Green Book, here.
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, which meant he wasn’t owned by the Communist Party of SA. 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.
