I want to make a note of a couple of good ideas that I sometimes lose track of. Not mine, of course. Just things I have read but forget to apply sometimes. One is from H. G. Wells " Modern Utopia ".  He mentions that names for groups of people do not denote anything in the real world. The larger the group, the more useless the name. This applies to "socialist", "black people", "climate change deniers" ... The advice is to seriously limit the use of such words in serious discussion. A similar insight comes from Buddhism , which goes further and applies skepticism to words that denote anything at all. A "real" object does not exist in and of itself. It exists in relationship to other "things". Its existence is time-limited and is constantly in flux. I would add that our ideas about "things" are "scale dependent" in time as well as space. If you look closely at anything, the "object" is lost and...

I have written a bit about capitalism in the past . In this post, I'd like to put the idea in the context of how it relates to other elements of our society, past, and present. Here is a great Wikipedia article on capitalism. I love the way it puts capitalism in a historical context. The relatively modern view of capitalism seems to have emerged with Marx, who viewed it as an inherently evil and doomed system. These days, defenders of capitalism present it as the exact opposite of "socialism", which is seen to be evil in all its variations. It helps to avoid all the moral outrage and take a look at what capitalism is and why some like it but others don't. The issue is about ownership of the means of production, along with ownership of "profits" arising from that ownership. We are bothered by the fact that the "owners" are a tiny minority of society and the rest of us slave to make the rich even richer. To me, this system seems to be built...

Banks are another part of the machinery we call "Canada". Although they are subject to a lot of criticism, they perform an essential function. One of them is to "create money". When you borrow money from a bank, the money doesn't come from a big pile of cash in the vault. It is created "out of thin air" by increasing a number in your account (money the bank owes you). There is also an equal but opposite number created in the bank's books, reflecting a debt you owe to the bank (an asset to the bank). The banking "system" is machinery that maintains the illusion that "bank money" is interchangeable with the "real money" the Government prints. But these two kinds of money are really not the same thing. In particular, when bank money, backed by debt, is threatened by the inability to collect the debt that backs it, the entire system is threatened. This is what happened in 2008 and explains (more or less) why the governm...

I have been pleased to find some lively discussions on Facebook, along with the frustration you often get on Facebook. Facebook is seldom the place to exchange real information and have constructive dialogue. Accordingly, I have decided to take the talk about "money" offline into this blog for people who are genuinely interested. What is a dollar? First, let's ask "what is Canada"? That's obviously a huge question that could only be answered at book-length. For our purposes, we can highlight a few things that are "moving parts" in the vast machinery we call Canada. We have a Federal government that is "representative". At least, in theory, it works on behalf of the citizens and in the interests of the citizens. It owes its legitimacy to this assumption. Call it a myth if you like, but it's "our" government, even if we didn't vote for it. One thing citizens would hate is to wake up one morning and find out that thei...