I think at best there’s evidence for a correlation between productivity and wages and even that correlation has largely disappeared since the 80s. If you’re looking for causation, I’m afraid that without union representation, wage increases come before productivity gains and it’s not difficult to see why. If your labour cost increases, your profit margin decreases. If you can’t decrease wages, you have to get more product out of the same labour. You can do that by investing in more or better tooling, equipment, training, automation. That is productivity increase.

In a union environment, the union can force higher wages when there’s increase in profits as a result of productivity gains. Which then drives further productivity increases as the owner tries to get their margins higher again. Which drives the kind of feedback loop which creates the tight productivity-wage correlation we’ve observed in the post-depression period till the 80s. You probably know what happened after that.

-We printed nearly 50% more money supply within the span of a few years.

-They did mass immigration in order to depress wage pressure caused by the phillips curve.

-People are now poorer overall, we have a shortage of housing and doctors, and as the Bank of Canada was raising rates to cool the job market we now have extreme levels of youth unemployment and we arent even in a recession yet.

Remember when eating the rich prepare the billionaires like beef steaks and roasts. The multimillionaires like pork, ribs and butt/picnic shoulder. Prepare economists like sausages.

Remember to cook low and slow and don’t forget the spices.

Also remember that billionaires arent the ones bailing themselves out with billions in newly minted dollars, in the end they are at the whims of the people you elect.

When even the new housing minister says something as fundamental as housing prices shouldnt fall you know you’ve messed up, if your goal is to help the poor.

Political campaigns cost a lot of money and billionaires fund the ones that would bail them out directly or indirectly. So billionaires are in fact bailing themselves out. This is why we so often find ourselves in the situation where all candidates are shit and we try voting for the lesser turd. If it were merely a matter of voting, we wouldn’t be in this position. Unless this is widely understood and we take the steps needed to counteract it, we’d forever be pointing at either the housing minister, or the voters and ask how could this still be happening. (Actually we won’t because the system would collapse when workers eventually revolt, but you get what I’m saying.)

The theory that if we only let large firms fail when they fuck up, things would get better is a fantasy because that changes nothing of significance in who holds power in society. And that’s before we think about corporate ownership and how profits are protected during failure. And before we consider that when firms fail, they rarely disappear. Instead they get absorbed, customers, employees and capital by their competitor, creating even bigger firms, now able to exercise higher market power, and their owners even richer. Competition does not lead to a competitive equilibrium outside of rare cases. Instead it leads to consolidation and eventually monopolies or oligipolies.

Canada has campaign finance laws put in by Harper that prevent corporations from dumping millions into donations. Unless you meant a revolving door, that I can agree with; though we just voted for a Brookfield lobbyist so there is that.

Yes I do mean the revolving door. Also the campaign finance laws still favor better funded campaigns and we know how much better funded the cons are for example than anyone else. And then there’s the spending that goes to advertising from third parties which is very high. And then we have the third party ad spending outside of campaign periods. Your Canada Prouds and such pushing corporate propaganda all day, every day. And then in some provinces there are no limits for provincial elections or the limits are quite high. Don’t get me wrong, we’re in a much better position in this regard to the USA but we’re very much not in a democratic environment that really favours the majority of working Canadians.

My employer’s stock price is 400% of what it was when I was hired, my wage has gone up 20% in the same period.

I can not wait for this house of cards to collapse. I have enough food, water, and locally stored media to barter my way though the first hump and get rescued by the Europeans.