This will never get old lol

Red Terror under the PRC 🇨🇳

The first thing you should do when talking about Taiwan is denounce Beijing's intergenerational policy demanding the genocidal destruction of the successor state to a sovereign founding member of the UN.

Land tax is a wealth tax. There is 6x more land value in Canada than the combined wealth of all its billionaires.

The key to bringing down prices is to make land a less attractive investment. Shifting taxes to land reduces bidding pressure (including from owner-occupants and mom-and-pop investors) and can replace harmful taxes on income and property.

Imagine if our tax system didn't take from work, but rewarded it. We could do that by eliminating income, property, and transfer taxes with land value tax, while improving the housing market. BC's land assessment was designed to do just this. Here's how it could work. 1/🧵

Imagine if our tax system didn't take from work, but rewarded it. We could do that by eliminating income, property, and transfer taxes with land value tax, while improving the housing market. BC's land assessment was designed to do just this. Here's how it could work. 1/🧵

Land is by far the #1 source of wealth and poverty — of rising net worths and rising costs — in our economy. Even if we taxed away every billionaire's wealth, it won't come close to fixing the cost of housing. bsky.app/profile/floy...

Land is a big deal. Maybe the solution to the housing crisis lies there.

It's a good step forward, but much more to do. Canada is on track to lose $1 TRILLION of our country's minerals wealth to private extraction, equal to a head-tax of $24,000 per Canadian. This is a shared inheritance that should be paying citizens dividends instead.

The 'trifecta' of a new social contract.

Natural resources are gifts of nature owned by all citizens. It should benefit all citizens through universal dividends.

3/4 of Canada's wealth is in real estate. The bulk of it lies within land. The vast majority of that is 'unearned' - not through the work of individuals but from public investment. Recouping part of that back is fair and efficient.

"🇷🇺's GDP is smaller than that of Italy. The combined GDP of Europe and the 🇺🇸 is more than 20x bigger than that of 🇷🇺. Europe and the 🇺🇸 don't even need to use their own money, they can take the 300 billion USD in frozen Russian assets and give it to Ukraine 🇺🇦" - Yuval Noah Harari

Graphic from Taiwan outlet Watchout

To be clear: Taiwan is independent right now. That is the cross-Strait status quo since 1949. The ROC government has existed uninterrupted as an independent government since 1911.

The second of the Six Assurances says, "The United States has not agreed to consult with the PRC on arms sales to Taiwan." This is a direct contravention of longstanding bipartisan norms regarding US-Taiwan relations.

It's not a mystery why Taiwan 🇹🇼 doesn't want to be invaded and/or annexed by the PRC 🇨🇳 .

Guys, China’s risk calculus on Taiwan is not determined by some global scale of the acceptability of aggression

China, right now, believes that the costs of attacking Taiwan are unacceptable, U.S. deployment or otherwise. I think it's important that the doom and gloom about deterrence and the future of the free world not come from the free world. To believe that we are doomed is to doom ourselves.

My conversation with @danzwku.bsky.social on Taiwan.. We share a hope for peace across the Taiwan Strait, for the Taiwanese people to choose their own destiny, and for freedom of the Chinese people on the mainland. youtu.be/eYX-EsrmbgA

Scholz was the German Chamberlain. Merz has the chance to become the German Churchill.

As both a German and an American, I wish this wasn’t so. I would very much love to be proven wrong about this in 2025.

The lesson of 2024: Don’t count on America. The lesson of 2025 will be: Don’t count on Germany.