One Comment About Taxation – Resentment Is Not a Tax Revenue Model

 

When growing up in Fort McMurray, AB, my family ran a number of small businesses. I learned at an early age that nobody hands an entrepreneur a paycheque. They put their own capital at risk, work brutal hours, and live with the real possibility that it might all come to nothing. Unfortunately, that is a common result. However, if it works, they build something – jobs, a payroll, and a stake in their community. That asymmetry – private risk, uncertain reward – is the engine of every economy worth living in.

 

I thought about that when Elon Musk became the world’s first trillionaire. SpaceX went public last Friday in the largest initial public offering in history, raising roughly US$75 billion at a valuation near US$2 trillion and pushing Musk’s paper net worth past US$1.1 trillion. Some 4,400 SpaceX employees became instant millionaires on the listing.

 

You might think that the man behind the companies that build reusable rockets, connect remote communities and are reshaping the global auto industry would be grudgingly admired. You would be wrong.

 

The reaction from the political left was immediate and uniform. The usual suspects sent out messages of a “rigged economy”, demands for a wealth tax, “tax the rich!”, “together, we must fight back” and the U.S. federal government is “for sale”.

 

And here at home, one of the national newspapers ran an opinion piece under the headline “SpaceX IPO makes Elon Musk the first trillionaire. Here’s how to properly hate him,” before quietly replacing the headline, conceding it did not meet proper editorial standards. Properly hate him. Reflect on that. A man builds rockets that land themselves, and the instinct is to instruct readers in the etiquette of resentment. The replacement headline – asking whether a new trillionaire is “a bad look for capitalism” – was meant to sound reasonable, but it gives the game away more completely than the first. Its premise is that one person’s success is something the entire system must answer for. That is exactly backwards. Getting astonishingly rich by building things people freely choose to buy is not a bad look for capitalism. It is the whole point of it.

 

Consider what he did. Musk did not find his trillion dollars; he created them. SpaceX collapsed the cost of reaching orbit and broke a government-contractor cartel grown fat and lazy. Tesla dragged a century-old industry into the future. A satellite network now connects otherwise non-reachable areas where no one else would build. Across his companies he employs well over 100,000 people and supports a vast supplier base. This is not wealth extracted from a fixed pie. It is a bigger pie, and everyone who touched it is better off. You may dislike the man, as most of his critics do, but the dislike is almost always for his politics or his fortune rather than anything he built. That changes nothing about the work.

 

It is worth asking what actually drives the reaction. Only one part is serious: the worry that concentrated wealth becomes concentrated power – that a trillionaire can buy politicians, platforms and outcomes the rest of us cannot. Fair enough – but tax policy responses like a wealth tax make that worse, not better: the more the government can take and redistribute, the more the wealthy will spend to influence where it goes. And the trillionaire, with his lawyers and his exit visa, is the last person such a tax ever catches.

 

The bill lands on the merely rich and the founder still building. The rest is mood disguised as argument – what Calgary author Mark Milke, of The Aristotle Foundation, calls the victim cult, in which success is treated as evidence of wrongdoing and every outcome as proof of injustice rather than effort. Once that becomes the reflex, wealth itself is suspect and the conclusion arrives before the analysis.

 

The wealth tax is what that grievance becomes in policy form, and it is a bad idea. It is riddled with design problems, starting with how to value assets not yet in cash. And it is easy to escape: capital and its owners simply leave, so it raises little revenue while deterring the capital you want to attract.

 

Recently, Norway nudged up its wealth tax and watched dozens of its richest citizens head for Switzerland. Those departing taxpayers controlled an estimated US$54 billion of wealth. The result? Less revenue for the treasury, not more. The threat of a billionaires tax in California is causing a similar capital flight. In 2021-22, Canada considered introducing a wealth tax before shelving it.

 

Wealth is mobile, and resentment is not a revenue model.

 

Countries do not tax their way to prosperity. They prosper by creating the conditions for capital, talent and entrepreneurship to stay, grow and multiply. The real question is not how governments can better redistribute wealth, but how they can help create more of it in the first place.

 

Back home in Canada, we do not have a trillionaire problem; we have the opposite – bleeding capital, talent and ambition across the border. We can learn from Estonia, which has topped the Tax Foundation’s competitiveness ranking for 12 straight years, on a simple idea: a low and simple flat personal income tax, a corporate tax that completely exempts tax on reinvested earnings and only applies when money is extracted from the company, and broad-based use of a consumption tax.

 

The honest lesson of the world’s first trillionaire is not how to hate him. It is how to become the kind of country where the next one chooses to build here. That starts with a tax system that rewards risk instead of confiscating its rewards – the same bet my family made on small businesses in Fort McMurray – scaled to the heavens.

 

Teach a generation that success will be punished, and you will get exactly what you incentivize: a great deal less of it.

 

One Comment About Leadership – Conveniences or Opportunities?

 

One of my favorite leaders to learn from is Lee Brower. Every Monday he puts out a five-minute “Meaningful Monday” video, and it’s always worth the five minutes.

 

His June 8, 2026 edition opened with a mother in Utah who sent her son – under ten – up to the Chick-fil-A counter to order for the family himself. He came back grinning: “My legs were shaking, but I want to do it again.” Something in him had grown. He’d learned the one thing no screen will ever teach him – that he can do hard things.

 

Brower’s point: the shaking legs weren’t a sign something was wrong. They were evidence that growth was happening. Confidence isn’t the absence of nerves. It’s moving forward while you still have them.

 

Then he laid out the chain:

 

Opportunities become experiences. Experiences become confidence. Confidence becomes capability. Capability becomes contribution.

 

Here’s where it stops being about parenting. Brower says it plainly – run your business the same way. Which turns it into an uncomfortable question for anyone who leads people: am I giving my team more conveniences, or more opportunities?

 

Conveniences feel like good leadership. You step in, smooth the path, take the hard client call yourself because it’s faster and cleaner. It’s also how you quietly guarantee your people never grow. The leg-shaking opportunity you’d rather spare them is the only thing that starts the chain.

 

And underneath it is a trap Brower names and most of us won’t admit: we like being needed. But the honest measure of a leader isn’t how indispensable you’ve made yourself. It’s whether the place runs – and runs well – when you’re not in the room.

 

So, leaders, hand out the opportunity, not the convenience. The contribution you’re after is on the far side of someone else’s shaking legs.

 

One Comment About Economics / Politics  – The Homeless Crisis

 

For those of you who know me, you’ll know that few things tug at my heart like seeing homeless people on the street. So many are obviously wrestling with mental health and addiction. I’m no expert on the causes, but it grips me every time.

 

What I’m sure of is this: the political left’s prescription – tolerate the disorder and manage the addiction instead of treating it – doesn’t work. It makes things worse. I continually see that and I again saw it firsthand last week.

 

I was at a conference in Santa Monica, CA. The last time my wife and I spent real time there was 2015 – outdoor activities, good food and wine, shopping the bustling 3rd Street Promenade, renting bikes to ride from Santa Monica through Venice Beach. I still remember a great lunch on the boardwalk there.

 

Last week was a different city. The Promenade was a near-ghost town of shuttered storefronts. Venice Beach was unrecognizable – boarded-up shops and encampments everywhere. Shocking and sad.

 

So, what happened between 2015 and today?

 

The easy answer the locals gave me was “COVID, and the homeless moved in.” That’s part of it. But the fuller story is a case study in how progressive governance hollows out a place. On the retail side, Santa Monica spent years making it hard to do business – it banned chain restaurants in 2018 and layered on costs, including a wastewater fee that ran $70,000 for a 50-seat restaurant before it served a single plate. Foot traffic was already thinning before the pandemic finished the job. Tellingly, the city’s current rescue plan is to reverse all of it: scrap the fees, cut the permitting, get out of the way. Deregulation as damage control.

 

On the street side, the failure was treating symptoms instead of causes. Encampments were tolerated, the underlying mental health and addiction problems went untreated, and the predictable happened – the disorder spread and the visitors left. That isn’t compassion. It’s simple abandonment that is masked as tolerance.

 

I’m a fan of policy that deals with the underlying problem – real treatment for mental health and addiction, even when that means saying no to someone for their own good. And I’m a fan of cleaning up areas that have become dangerous and squalid, which the U.S.  Supreme Court confirmed last year that cities are entitled to do. It’s better economics. More than that, it’s the right thing to do for our brothers and sisters on those streets.

Bonus Comment – From Eleanor  Roosevelt – American First Lady, Diplomat and Humanitarian – About The Importance of Experience

 

“You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face.”

 

Leaders – are you providing your teammates with opportunities for good experiences for growth?

 

I hope today’s newsletter has been thought-provoking for you.

 

As many of you know, I’m passionate about helping people make better decisions – whether in tax, leadership, or business. If you’d like to go deeper on those topics, my recently released book, Making Life Less Taxing (Version 2), is now available and expands on many of the practical ideas I’ve written about over the years.

 

I’m also putting the finishing touches on my next book, Leadership Compounds: How Small Decisions Build Culture, Credibility, and Legacy. It explores a simple but powerful idea: leadership isn’t about grand gestures – it’s about the small, consistent decisions that compound over time.

 

For those interested in a more hands-on approach, I’ll soon be announcing a bespoke consulting initiative – The Acorn Growth Program – designed to help leaders and organizations grow intentionally, one small (but important) decision at a time. Feel free to reach out to me directly for more information.

 

And if you’re not already on my mailing list, feel free to sign up for my In the Mood Network newsletters to receive more content. No fluff – just practical insights on tax, leadership, and economic policy.

 

Thanks for reading. As always, I welcome your thoughts and feedback.

 

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