Wednesday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading.

- Linsey McGoey discusses the historical case for abolishing billionaires rooted in Adam Smith's critique of plutocracy:

Smith was scathingly critical of the wealthy’s disproportionate power over government policymaking. He complained about the tendency of the rich to shirk tax obligations, unfairly passing tax burdens on to poor workers. He heaped scorn on government bailouts of the East India Company. He thought dirty money in politics was akin to bribery, and that it undermined the duty to govern impartiality. He wasn’t alone.

The reality is that the historical case for abolishing billionaire privileges has a long heritage, stretching to enlightenment thinkers and the revolutionaries they inspired, including countless enslaved and working-class people in forgotten graves.

Thomas Paine, the 18th-century British radical whose writing helped to spur the American Revolution, called for the establishment of a wealth fund, financed by taxes on property, that would give every woman and man a lump sum of money in both early adulthood and again in old age. Today, basic income policy proposals revive this idea.
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The handouts to the rich that he complains about in Wealth of Nations have never entirely disappeared. Instead, a language of “free trade” has obscured the government’s role in favouring the wealthy. Just look at the past 30 years, a time of ever-growing subsidies to pharmaceutical executives who gouge consumers with unacceptably high drug prices; tax gifts to tech corporations that lobby to erode worker and consumer protections; the ever-replenishing “money-tree” of quantitative easing programmes that rain on the rich while the poor work ever-longer hours.

Smith did talk about the invisible hand. But he also wrote about the “invisible chains” that structure people’s lives. He and his revolutionary friends understood that wealth inequality could become a type of invisible cage. He taught his readers a simple lesson: keep the power of the rich in check.

- Meanwhile, Michal Rozworski examines how so many British voters cast ballots for a Conservative government which they knew couldn't care less about their well-being.

- Scott Leon and Brittany Andrew-Amofah offer some suggestions to improve the availability of housing due to its critical effect on people's health. BC Housing studies the effect of non-profit housing on property values and concludes that the former doesn't harm the latter. And Angela Sterritt reports on the Squamish Nation's plan to build 6,000 rental housing units in Vancouver.

- Meanwhile, Zak Vescera reports on the response of landlords to the Moe government's short-sighted welfare changes - with the predictable effect being an avoidable increase in evictions.

- Finally, H.M. Jocelyn highlights how the Trudeau Libs have sold out Canadian sovereignty and privacy to the Trump administration.