Treating the symptoms

PiP shorts #09

When a Ponzi-scheme runs out of money, that is not a bug, it is a feature.

I already started my post for next week when I got this from @John Carter:
If You Want To Afford a Home, They Need To Go Home
While I share the sentiment, I wish it was that easy......

John Carter

says:

Canada’s population has increased by ten million people in the last twenty years, almost twenty-five percent. Send them home and there would be a lot of space. The same holds true in every one of our countries.
Of course, that isn’t going to happen under the current regime.
Why?
Simple. From its perspective, the housing crisis is not a crisis at all.
It’s a way of life.

It resonates well with my post “In politics nothing happens by accident”

As I was reading this postcard from Barsoom, I found myself agreeing with most of it. My own post is about radical and simple solutions to obvious problems. I like radical and straightforward. Then I read the post again and yet again, and at every turn I found more problems with it.
While I can relate to the problem more than I can say; while I can understand and sympathize with the attitude approaching it, I’m afraid it is not a solution.

The problem described by @John Carter – immigration outpacing the development of the infrastructure needed to support it – is, just as he pointed out in the quote above, not a crisis at all. It’s a way of life.
In other words, it is not a bug, it is a feature. it is only a symptom of a slew of real problems.

Immigration is just the most visible, the most proximate cause of the problems.  This video:

… offers a bit more nuanced response, but still does not touch on all of the problems.

For those of you who do not already know, I am an immigrant in Canada, landed over forty years ago. I like Canada and wouldn’t be happy if I was forced to leave.
I have family here, but I know a few immigrants who already decided on their own to leave. I know several Central European immigrants who moved back because it makes more financial sense to them.
My Mexican step-granddaughter wanted to move here when she was a teenager but after finishing university, she decided that it will be better for her to stay in Mexico. Just a few months ago, I met a Mexican guy in his early thirties in Puerto Escondido who grew up in California as a child of illegal immigrants. He moved back to Mexico for the much greater opportunities there.

John Carter

is absolutely right saying that the planes can fly both ways.
Sooner or later, the millions of immigrants who came here for the social benefits and the dreams of making it in America/Canada/Western Europe will realize that they are the late-joiners to the welfare-state Ponzi-scheme. When they understand that they are expected to work their asses off to pay for the benefits that the governments promised to the existing population that did not contribute enough, they can just leave.

What shall we do then? What shall we do with an aging population, in an economic slow-down with collapsing house prices, unsustainable debt, serious labour shortages, a crumbling infrastructure with no tax revenue to fix it and I could go on.
Shouldn’t we ask who are the real suckers in this game?

Here is another video to illustrate the subject, a forester talking about labour shortages and demographics:

I even discovered a business, the Nomad Capitalist, living in Malaysia, helping people to liberate themselves from oppressive taxation and regulations in the Western world.

This issue is far, far more complicated than out of control immigration. It is all about the layers between proximate and ultimate causes. It is about geopolitics, the nature of the welfare state, technology and a globalized economy, politics and its foundational idea, the concept of the free lunch.
It was NOT the immigrant vote that put Justine into office three times. (yes, the misspelling is deliberate)

I should return to this subject in a more involved post. Please encourage me with your comments and likes if you would like me to do it.

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