In my latest National Post column I take on the concept that a new phone, or new anything, can revolutionize our lives every few years.

In my latest National Post column I offer good news and bad: we know what's needed to fix our broken governments. 

"I can listen patiently to a Communist repeating for hours at a time that Property is unnecessary, because men must surrender selfish interests to social ideals. I only begin to break the furniture when somebody starts to prove that Property is necessary, because men are all selfish and every man must look after himself. The case for Property is not that a man must look after himself; but, on the contrary, that a normal man has to look after other people, if it be simply a wife and family. It is that this unit should have an economic basis for its social independence. If he were considering only himself, he might be more independent as a vagabond; he might be more secure as a serf. But the point at the moment is that I like Property because it is a noble thing. I can respect the revolutionist who dislikes it because it is an ignoble thing. But I have no truck with the cynic who likes it because it is ignoble."

G.K. Chesterton in "The New Dark Ages" in G.K.’s Weekly May 21 1927, quoted in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 9 # 8, Issue 73 (July-August 2006) p. 9.

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