The main users of Canada Post are businesses anyway: junk mail. I get maybe one actual letter from a non-business per year. I doubt my experience is out of the ordinary. Subsidizing Canada Post out of tax revenue would just be subsidizing those businesses that use it to flood our boxes with fliers and coupons.

If we’re going to subsidize it then we should probably move to weekly delivery, rather than daily, and stop delivery of junk mail altogether. But that would cost a lot of postal worker jobs, which seems to be the main purpose of keeping Canada Post in existence.

Even if you take only 10% of Canada’s land area, that still exceeds the land area of 160 other countries in the world, including many with far larger populations such as Pakistan (6x the population of Canada with less than 9% of the area). By the way, Pakistan is a highly mountainous country with more than half of its area covered by uninhabitable mountain ranges and deserts.

You didn’t address my points about investing at all. I think there’s a pretty good case to be made that governments are fighting against the construction of new subdivisions in order to protect the property values of existing single family homes. It’s not about stigma, it’s about the fact that too much of the upper middle class’s wealth is tied up in real estate and the government is terrified of jeopardizing that!

Canada is the second-largest country in the world by land area. There’s no reason we should have a housing crisis, yet we do. The answer is to build more houses. A LOT more. And that will make all the other issues go away.

Yes, even those hated real estate speculators. They’ll stop investing in real estate when the value of their investments goes down because of oversupply.

We should also be looking to incentivize investment in the stock market. When people invest their money in unproductive real estate instead of productive stocks and bonds it makes the economy sick. It leads away from innovation and employment and towards unproductive rent-seeking, AKA Neo-feudalism.

It’s not just lumber. It’s cement, shingles, drywall, bricks, nails, screws, floor tile, cabinets, carpet, electrical, plumbing, lightbulbs, ventilation, heating, cooling, landscaping, exterior decor…

There’s thousands of different materials and parts that go into a house! Lumber is just the tip of the iceberg. Are you going to have the government run all of those industries? How do you deal with corruption?

That’s how supply and demand works. When the government decides to build something, they create more demand for materials but they don’t create more supply. If they could snap their fingers like a genie and create a pile of building materials out of thin air then they could make prices go down. But obviously they can’t do that!

You might say “oh well the construction materials companies could just keep charging the same prices and be satisfied with their current profits” and you’d be right, they could do that. But then the distributors and retailers would raise prices and capture those profits themselves! You could also insist that the distributors and retailers do the same thing. But then you’d get private individuals stockpiling the materials and reselling them at a profit, just like people did with toilet paper shortages during COVID.

You could then say “oh but we’ll make that illegal too” then you end up with a black market. Now you’ve got to hire tons of police officers to fight against the black market you created with your price control policies.

Ultimately you can’t win against the laws of supply and demand.

Wow what a cutie!

Movie theatres make almost nothing from ticket sales. They have to pay a huge lump sum (upwards of $100,000) up front just to be able to get the movie and show it for a month. Often they simply lose money on it! So the crazy price of snacks is an attempt to recoup their investment faster and hope to get some profit.

The other model is for the theatre to simply pay 95% of ticket sales to the movie studio for the first week (and a bit less as the weeks go on). This essentially guarantees the theatre loses money on the film (due to all the other overhead that easily eat up that 5%) but it’s less risky if the film is a failure. Either way, they only make money on food!

There are player-run servers for MMORPGs such as Ultima Online and EverQuest. If the developers released the server software the fans wouldn’t have to implement their own (which they did for those two games). If the company is no longer running their own servers they are no longer making money from subscriptions so they won’t lose money to competition from player-run servers.