In my latest National Post column I say tax reform would be easier to discuss and accomplish if governments weren't universally desperate for money. So arguably politicians and voters should give more thought to why they are.

"As a profession, we have made a mess of things. It seems to me that this failure of economics to guide policy more successfully is closely connected with our general propensity to imitate as closely as possible the procedures of the brilliantly successful physical sciences, an attempt which in our field may lead to serious error…. If man is not to do more harm than good in his efforts to improve the social order he will have to learn that in this, as in all other fields where essential complexity of an organized kind prevails, he cannot acquire that full knowledge which would make mastery of the events possible."

Friedrich Hayek in his Nobel Prize in Economics acceptance speech, quoted in Brian Lee Crowley Crowley The Road to Equity

In my latest National Post column I wish news stories would more often refer to government spending being cut, especially by contrast with the lurid and generally inaccurate "slashed".

"When the economic chickens come home to roost, they tend to arrive in flocks."

Editorial in National Post August 12, 2015

"Economics is a science which studies human behavior as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses."

Lionel Robbins
 

In my latest National Post column I say you don't get the poor nice things, including trendy ones like organic food, by price controls that crush entrepreneurs.

“in all their actions all men do in fact aim at what they think good.”

Aristotle The Politics

"mathematical economics is what is called in criminal circles 'a racket.'"

Stephen Leacock "Through a Glass Darkly” in On the Front Line of Life