WHEN I GAINED A BA ABOUT 50 YEARS AGO, IT WAS A VIRTUAL GUARANTY OF EMPLOYABILITY.

Trudeau under David Lewis and Ed Broadbent. But even this government, which is responsible, especially in league with its profligate cousins in the provincial government of Ontario, for top personal income tax levels that could not be justified in any circumstances except an extreme national emergency, seems to see that pushing rates much higher will drive wealth out, intensify the ingenuity of tax avoidance measures and raise the cost of tax collection, and someone might even understand that attracting wealth is good for economic growth, though it would be hard to credit this regime with that insight on its record. stylists where barbers will do, financial advisers that executives who know how to do their jobs don’t need (that is, those who don’t need to cite to their directors and shareholders as the justification for compensation that is too high and as the source of ideas that didn’t work and were costly). In these circumstances, the pressures are not those of the free market for more skilled trades to reduce their cost to customers and employ more people who are now being expensively educated in uneconomic academic courses, creating spurious and practically redundant place men (like Lindsay Shepherd’s harassers at Wilfrid Laurier). The pressures instead assure the proliferation of more and more superfluous occupations at greater and greater social cost.

If the governments in Canada applied some of the disciplines to the education monster mentioned last week in this space, and the incentives to skilled trades, and perforated union influences in overpaid areas, and required the consolidation of statutes and regulations to make legal advice more easily and less expensively attainable, permitted private medicine and redefined universality as a guaranteed basic level for everyone and reduced government benefit for those who could afford to have it reduced, a later retirement age for those who wish to continue working, and privatization of some government services, personal and corporate income taxes could be reduced, the multiplier effect of increased private spending and saving and investment would increase economic growth rates, and a benign cycle would begin.

We see the results of these strains in the politics of almost all advanced countries. In the United States, Trump and Clinton, whatever their other limitations, managed to keep the country between the 30-yard lines and out of the hands of the Ted Cruz far-right and the Bernie Sanders far-left. (Either would be a disaster.) And Trump is imposing some reason in policies for economic growth, better and less wasteful nonunionized