Deflation? Inflation?

 

The price of regular gas in this community is now 232.9 per litre, a new high on its way to $4, I expect. The price of crude eventually will come down, at least relative to other commodities and services, although maybe not in nominal dollar terms if inflation is not curbed. The price of fuel can only rise to the point where the economy is crippled and demand is curtailed. It may well be that many other prices will fall then too. With everyone speaking about inflation, it should be no surprise if deflation is this economy’s destiny.  As credit contracts, due to decreasing demand, inflation may exhale its last breath sooner than we think. Of course, central banks could lose their nerve and open the floodgates again, but one might wonder if it would reignite price inflation once a deflation has become the expectation. I am reminded of Herbert Hoover, whose large budgetary deficits failed to reverse the deflation of his day.

Abortions and Day Care

 

Someone moaned to me recently about the reversal of Roe v. Wade --- the unjustness of it. Around the same time I heard a radio interview with someone else who lamented that we have so few abortion facilities in Canada, and they told of a guy that drove home in northern Saskatchewan from his remote work site in Alberta to drive his wife to Regina for an abortion. He had to stay awake that whole time, and then he had to drive her home and back to work to start his shift. The interviewee tried to elicit sympathy from the listeners, one of whom was me, except I was thinking “Poor murderers. How sad for them.”

The news from the USA prompted numerous politicians here to assure the sheeple that they will still be able to get an abortion in Canada anytime during the pregnancy. They make the process seem antiseptic --- no thought of scalpels sawing limbs off of babies or of saline solution burning off their skin and eventually killing the child if it’s lucky. They don’t tell us that the central nervous system can be seen to be developing from day 10. I explained my concerns to the person mentioned in the first line above, and added that a country where the population pyramid looks like ours, because the replacement rate is under 1.5 children per female, needs to be encouraging births. 

We need to make it easier to want and to raise children. I don’t often praise the Canadian government, but I do appreciate the efforts being made to make child care more available and to make immigration easier than it sometimes has been. We need more of that. We need to help parents. We need to particularly help single parents. Doing so is good for our children and good for the future of our country.