CIVILIZATIONS

Someone online was explaining how if one earns $250,000 annually in Ontario the average tax rate is over 37% and the marginal tax rate is 50%, meaning $94,220 is taken and you are left with just $155,780. This was framed as a crime. I was attempting to propose that earning $44,000 in Ontario, around median income and far higher than full-time minimum wage, would mean tax deductions leave a person with only $32,500 — in a province where typical rent is between $26,000 and $32,000 per year. So, I offered, it looks to me like the after-tax earnings for someone making $250,000 is equivalent to the pre-tax wages of three-and-a-half median income earners and the post-tax take-home of nearly five people earning median income. And you’ll notice the person making a quarter million dollars has also been granted the privilege of doing something with their life other than gifting all their earnings to their landlord. Apparently, no one had anything to say about any of that...

As I was recently writing about European arrival in North America, this whole business of earnings and rent reminded me about the situation on the ground in seventeenth century New France. In what was effectively feudal Quebec, the seigneur owned the land and offered his tenants, habitants, waterfront property, built them a gristmill, allowed them to procure food, and permitted them to do with the land basically whatever they wished. Not only was the landlord unable to increase the rent over time but rent was fixed at around one sack of flour for every twelve or sixteen produced, so not basically everything grown on the land but only a small fraction. Unlike our own time, that ancient regime is today considered a radically unfair social contract adjacent to medieval barbarism. Right.