Notes from the edge of civilization: July 19, 2026

Remove the workers but preserve the consumers; who funds the Canadian dream; passport colonialism.

Nouriel Roubini, the economist and strategist known for his prescient warnings about the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, has another prediction.

Roubini went on Bloomberg TV this weekend and casually explained that AI and robots would make large chunks of the population permanently unemployable, blowing a hole in the payroll tax system that supports Social Security and eventually making universal basic income or partial government ownership of Big Tech an inevitability.

The Bloomberg hosts, Scarlet Fu and Tom Keene, barely blinked and only briefly noted that Roubini’s future sounded like everyone losing their jobs. But then they cheerfully returned to reminiscing about Davos. Civilization may be approaching the end of productive work, but remember that time at the bar in the Alps?? Those were good times…

Roubini, for his part, tried to paint an optimistic picture: machines do the work, growth explodes, governments tax the winners, and everyone gets a check. The less charming and more realistic version is that humans become unnecessary as workers but remain useful only in their role as consumers. The state sends a monthly allowance to keep the shopping carts moving and the pitchforks in storage.

Welcome to the post-work future: fewer jobs, more surveillance, and just enough “money” to keep Amazon delivering.

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Roubini’s post-work future depends on taxing the winners and redistributing the proceeds. Canada may want to check whether the winners are planning to stick around.

A new report from the Fraser Institute says the top 20 percent of families now pay 65 percent of personal income taxes and 58 percent of all taxes (sales, payroll, property, and other taxes), despite earning just under half of total family income.

The report comes as Canada expands benefits, raises expectations, and watches high earners, doctors, and other skilled workers head south. A November 2025 report found that 20 percent of immigrants leave Canada within 25 years of landing, with onward migration peaking in the first five years. Immigrants with doctorates are nearly twice as likely to leave Canada within five years as those with bachelor’s degrees, and highly-skilled immigrants are more than twice as likely as lower-skilled immigrants to leave Canada within five years.

Progressive taxation is supposed to make the wealthy carry more of the load. The problem begins when the entire system depends on a small, mobile group unwilling to be the national ATM. How’s that working out, Canada?

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So, when the national ATM decides enough is enough, there’s always a Caribbean island willing to sell an escape route. At least, there was…

The European Union is now threatening to strip visa-free travel from Antigua, St. Kitts, Dominica, St. Lucia, and Grenada unless they shut down programs that sell citizenship to foreign investors — programs the small island nations say have become critical sources of revenue for them.

A critical source of revenue for one government is an annoyance to another government. People who want to unburden themselves from the pilfering that comes from high-tax countries will alway seek new places — it’s the free marketplace of sovereignty.

Until it isn’t.

Western nations have argued that the citizenship programs offer a backdoor for applicants from other countries to gain visa-free access to their countries with little due diligence. OK… a fair concern; citizenship should require a little more checking than a Costco membership.

Still, the ultimatum is rich coming from a bloc built around the concept of free movement of capital and people. Europe spent decades teaching the world that citizenship was an economic asset, but now it’s alarmed when small Caribbean nations are charging market rates for it.

Apparently passports may be bought, sold and leveraged — just not by countries too small to write the rules.

We take these kinds of grumblings as a shot across the bow; your ability to move freely and find places to protect the spoils of your own hard work is being eroded with each passing month. Continue to position yourself wisely in this increasingly hostile environment.

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