It does not take a particularly active imagination to see the obvious problem with a government’s enlisting banks, without court oversight, to freeze the assets of protesters hostile to the government and ordering the disclosure of their information to the police and intelligence agencies, especially when the justice minister himself publicly states that donors who are “members of a pro-Trump movement” should be worried. One need not sympathize with the protesters themselves to spot the obvious and disturbing precedent set by this unjustifiable overreach. And since there is no indication that this information will be destroyed upon the expiry of the current Emergencies Act declaration, the government of the day has the potential to acquire and retain a list of hundreds — possibly thousands — of Canadians identified as “unfriendly.”
Stephen Moore on how antitrust legislation would hurt the U.S.:
While there are many proposed antitrust bills, every “solution” would increase the size of the government and vastly expand the power of federal regulators. The complaint is that companies such as Amazon, Apple, Google, and Walmart have seized too much market share in industries that they helped create and that never even existed 20 years ago. Their competitors that have been left in the dust or were late to the game are the biggest cheerleaders of all for these “anti-monopoly” actions. So now iconic American companies that have added trillions of dollars of consumer surplus, added trillions to shareholder wealth, and hired hundreds of thousands of workers are suddenly villains. Instead of trusting in the time-tested efficiency of market forces and competition, these politicians want a government that’s $30 trillion in debt to pick winners and losers.