The difference between the US welfare and the Canadian welfare is obvious once you look at Trumpbucks vs Trudeaubucks.

Trumpbucks dropped into people’s accounts. Even those who, like N and I, are working and getting a good income got their Trumpbucks.

In Canada, people got the same amount (factoring in the currency difference).

But.

Not all people got Trudeaubucks. Only those who lost jobs because of COVID (and can prove that it’s because of COVID and not, say, 3 days before and are now stranded because nobody is hiring, true story) will get the payment.

As a result, industries that are booming (like food packaging) can’t hire, true story. Because people don’t want to lose their Trudeaubucks.

This is extremely typical of Canadian welfare. Which is why I hate Canadian welfare. (Still love Canada, though). Canadian welfare is ferociously cruel towards people who like working. A hard-working person will be stripped raw to pass the money to lazy layabouts. And if a hard-working person falls on hard times, the welfare system will laugh in the poor bugger’s face and say, “hey, but don’t you still have that little piece of property? We won’t rest until we take it away.” (True story).

Yes, it’s extremely rare that you get the US government to drop cash into your account. But they don’t hunt you to the ground and strip you bare like the Canadian government does. The US system is flaccid and too convoluted but it’s not driven by an intense hatred of people who work. I mean, we are in the middle of a global pandemic, and the Trudeau government is obsessing over the remote chance that somebody who was fired the day before the quarantine and not the day after would get help.

P.S. For those who don’t know, I’m a Canadian citizen and my whole family lives in Canada (Quebec and Nova Scotia). I love Canada. It’s the Canadian welfare system that I dislike. I don’t vote in the Canadian elections, though, because I think it would be immoral given that I don’t live there.

COVID has offered a clear conclusion to our discussion of Caldwell’s book The Age of Entitlement.

Caldwell’s argument was that the moment you decide that it’s ok to disregard the Constitution just this once for a very good reason…

… and one more time for a really great reason…

… and a couple more times to make people feel good…

… and a bunch more times to make somebody feel safe …

… you can just forget the whole thing altogether.

And now we have people arrested for protesting against the government, people fined for assembling or practicing their religion, etc. It looks likely that this will go on for as long as at least some folks feel “unsafe.” And since somebody always feels unsafe, we are stuck without our constitutional rights. And nobody seems to mind because we have long accepted that these rights were conditional.