I agree with the sentiment, but I’m getting tired of the “eat the rich” slogan.

Unless someone is gonna go full Luigi, the reality is more like “reform tax and investment law!” which sounds way less cool, but way more attainable.

Like I said, I agree, but “eat the rich” doesn’t seem actionable. We can vote people in to change those stupid laws in the next election cycle. “Eat the rich” doesn’t have a clear next step.

Several things are driving extreme inequality :

• Corporate concentration : Behind every huge multinational, you find billionaires and extreme CEO compensation. This is why I avoid multinationals like Starbucks Coffee, Dunkin Donuts, McDonalds, Tim Hortons. I prefer to go to local coffees. This is also why I use Linux instead of Microsoft. This is why I encourage people to use Firefox instead of Google Chrome. This is why I financially support free open source software such as LibreOffice, VLC, GIMP. This is why I always avoid huge hotel chains. I only go to local hotels. Every Billionaire owns a multinational. An economy of small and mid-sized businesses is an economy with far less inequality.

• Labor market flooding The labor market was flooded with temporary workers and recent migrants that often don’t know their basic rights. This has had bad consequences on low-income workers.

• Money in politics: Several provinces have very weak rules when it comes to money in politics. This gives rich donors enormous influence.

• Weak lobbying rules: The maximum fine for illegal federal lobbying in Canada is $25,000 dollars. If you get caught again, it’s $50,000. These figures are an absolute joke.

• Under-investment in public transit: Forcing people to use an individual car to move is a great way to support the insurance industry, the banking industry and the oil industry. Guess who happen to own Canadian Insurers, Canadian Banks and Oil Refineries? The elite.

• Stupid provincial tax policies A lot of the provincial tax policies are just plain stupid. Take Ontario. Doug Ford announced a tax cut on gas to help working families. This is a purely stupid idea. It means a Toronto Bank CEO going to the country club on Sunday gets a tax cut. The TD Bank clerk taking the bus doesn’t.

• Stupid zoning policies: Several Canadian cities make it incredibly hard to build apartment buildings. Toronto, which suffers from one of the worse housing crisis in the Western World, recently failed to allowed sixplexes citywide. Apartments buildings are far more affordable than individual homes. Winners are landlords and single home owners.

• Fucked charity system: Revenue Canada allows deductions for donations to charities. Perhaps it started out as a well-meaning idea, but it turned out to be a major mistake. Often, rich Canadians appoint their wives to these fake charities and give them a huge salary. It’s common to see charities paying people $300,000 or $750,000 to run an empty art gallery. The goal is just to pay less taxes. This system is now totally out of control.

Basically, this is going to require change at the federal, provincial and municipal level.

No yachts were harmed in the making of that solution.

I’m really jaded on whether reforming tax and investment law is a sustainable solution. Because the countries that did that are all trending in the direction of reversing those changes as capital accumulates and gains power over the political system and people (voters) themselves. Even in high union density places like Finland where unions and reformist socialist policy have slowed this process you can see people electing governments on austerity for the many. A policy squarely favouring their rich class. This speaks to erosion of the understanding of why the previous regulatory regime was introduced, who it benefitted, what would be the long term results of abandoning it, how things were before it. And this erosion isn’t random. There’s all sorts of information channels through which the rich convince people in explanations about the world that favour the rich. I hope there is some ingredient that if added would avoid this in the future for a very long time, but I’m not too hopeful. High prevalence of worker co-ops perhaps. I don’t know. Jaded I tell you!

It’s hard not to be jaded. In the past few decades it seemed like we might be able to make progress on climate change. But now we’ve fallen into a weird right wing rut, where people seem to vote squarely against their own best interests.

I dunno. I think everyone was implicitly on board with neoliberalism for a couple of decades, and now they find themselves poorer and lower status than before. So they blame the trappings of big-L liberal parties, scream that they want woke to end, and shoot themselves in the foot.

But yeah. I gotta hope!

I realize the phillips curve eventually reverts given enough time, in the short term it still depicts an expected increase in unemployment due to monetary stimulus.

The way I see it as far as corporate profits they will always rise when there is a large bout of stimulus, the stock market is a sea of green during hyperinflation as well when measured in nominal dollar terms. When you devalue dollars everything goes up relative to dollars.

Then the BoC raises rates to cool inflation which is when corporations profits would revert to the mean; inflation which was still pushed down via immigration and mortgage bond purchase despite the large price hikes. Till we are eventually left in this state of a cooled job market, now with excess labor and a large youth unemployment, and we haven’t even officially hit a technical recession yet.

As far as house prices rising and falling I think that’s just stimulus followed by rate hikes. We still have a dire shortage due to immigration which pushes up prices, with the mortgage purchases allowing prices to remain elevated despite rate hikes due to pushing down mortgage costs.

To my understanding the Philips curve doesn’t even depict an expected increase in unemployment due to monetary stimulus. It depicts a relationship between (lower) unemployment and (higher) wages, and therefore at some level of (low) unemployment, (higher) inflation, due to people having more money to spend. In the short run. This is in relation to government stimulus (Keyensian policy) that lowers unemployment. It says that stimulus can lower unemployment at expense of higher inflation. Not that stimulus leads to unemployment. In fact rising unemployment during stimulus is an example of the model breaking down over the long run, according to what’s written here.

You expect corporate profits to revert to the mean with cooling inflation, but this year, within our current higher interest rate environment, with inflation near target, corporate profits are at an all time high.. Sorry no data at my fingertips for Canada but the processes are the same. They even say that margins to GDP are at all time high. If prices rose because workers had more money in their pockets chasing the same goods due to stimulus, we wouldn’t see profits rise significantly more than wages. We wouldn’t see margins increase. This therefore can’t be wage-driven inflation. Which also means the Phillips curve doesn’t even apply here. I don’t know what else to tell you, but looking at BoC policy and population, without factoring in the market power of large firms in every consolidated market to set prices is bound to lead to incomplete conclusions and predictions. That’s kinda like considering that (level of) competition doesn’t have real effect on prices, irrespective of other variables.

Sorry I meant stimulus increases inflation, which increases the demand for labor to absorb the new money supply.

Wages arent going up due to immigration, thats my whole point. We also see capital shallowing.

I appreciate the thoughtful reply. However, I believe you have misunderstood my intentions towards a path forward. Allow me to clarify.

I am saying the 1%, in a madness driven fit of misguided self-interest, lead us inexorably to a world that has exceeded our planetary boundaries and must collapse due to its unsustainable nature. 8 billion people and counting on a finite planet that is degrading rapidly due to pollution, resource depletion and climate change, to name a few, is going to have A LOT of hungry people.

In this brave new world, famine will be a more prevalent phenomena. There is a reason why Bill Gates, Blackrock and everyone else are huge holders of farmland. It’s why Russia wants Ukraine. As Leonard Cohen once observed, “Everybody Knows”.

I am saying, when you, your family and your community are priced out of food due to multiple simultaneuous global breadbasket failures due to climate change occur, here is a simple and just solution - eat the rich.

Dry rubbed, woodsmoked, char-grilled rich people. It’s what’s for dinner. I suggest an oil rub with cumin, smoked paprika, cayenne, garlic powder, mustard powder and onion powder. Cook it low and slow around 225F.

Doesn’t matter if you are their fitness trainer, gardener, handyman or private security or just some dude who never met them until your fateful meal. Eat hardy while you can.

Bon appétit!

people see to vote squarely against their own best interests<

So much of this it is unbelievable. I have a buddy who has been unemployed his whole life, lives with his mom, who both rely extensively on physical and mental health services while both collecting disability pay. He is also bisexual. He is a trump supporter and votes conservstive in every level of election. I literally cannot comprehend it.