It's hard for me not to notice that up north in Canada, working folks, mostly truckers with their kids and pets who have been protesting peacefully and lawfully along with thousands of Canadian citizens who support their struggle to end job-killing mandates and restrictions on their livelihoods were just brutally attacked by law enforcement officials and arrested.
This reminds me of what JFK said once: "Those who make peaceful change impossible make violent change inevitable".
Thanks to citizen journalists armed with nothing more than their nerve and a cell phone we can all see the events raw and un-curated in public view since the legacy media has chosen to ignore the reality or, when that's impossible since they keep getting scooped by "amateur" journalists, they just plain lie about it.
Most of the protesters are working, family folks who run small businesses, pay their taxes and stayed to themselves mostly until the government decided to put them all out of business with mandates. Most of my clients also run businesses and can relate to the grievances these peaceful protesters have. Now they're being called "domestic terrorists" by the only ones actually committing terrorism - the police units attacking them. They are unarmed and just standing there as a witness to this brutality.
Every business owner here in America witnessing this behavior by the Canadian police should pay close attention to how hard it is for the citizens in Canada to claw back freedoms they once took for granted. Anyone who believes it can't happen here only need to look at NYC, LA, Boston and a growing list of jurisdictions where the right to open and run a business has been severely infringed by mandates. Police are arresting patrons at restaurants who refuse to disclose their medical information for "trespassing". Sitting in a NYC restaurant now means you have to "show your papers", leave or be arrested.
Another extremely unsettling aspect of these events is the collusion from the banking industry to weaponize legitimate financial transactions like donations to the truckers. Companies like Go Fund Me and TD Bank have colluded with government to literally appropriate the money regular folks donated through them. As unbelievable as that might sound it's actually far worse: A business owner in Ottawa donated $250 to the truckers through GiveSendGo which was hacked illegally. Her personal information was Doxxed and her business is now closed because they got inundated with death threats - for donating $250 to the truckers. In anther case, a city employee was fired when information was leaked that he donated $100.
Banks in Canada and the United States are now "cancelling" business and account holders whose political beliefs they disagree with. Paypal, Chase, WF, TD Bank and many others are now "social justice warriors" in the fight for political "correctness".
What does this all have to do with running a business? Nothing of course - this is social engineering 101 where the state purposely destroys the small business community with needless regulations that benefit the big-box players who will do the bidding of important shareholders like Blackrock and leave the business owner middle class twisting in the wind and dependent on the state.
In times like these it's important to read up a little on history because it tends to repeat in different ways. Capital has always served as ammunition for businesses who use it wisely - right now the cost of capital has stagnated and rates continue to stay low. Meanwhile, the prices on most everything needed to run a business are exploding higher.
The best strategy in this situation is using capital whose cost remains fixed to purchase materials and supplies whose prices are rising. In some cases the percentage increase is much higher than the net cost of capital making borrowing even at higher rates profitable.