"Liberty underlies the entire enterprise; it’s not just one more vector in an indifference curve.”
Walter Block in Michael Walker, ed., Freedom Democracy and Economic Welfare: Proceedings of an International Symposium
In my latest National Post column I ask: if this is not the moment to stand on conservative principle, when would be?
"'People think of the inventor as a screwball, but no one asks the inventor what he thinks of other people.' – Charles K. Kettering (1876-1958) American Engineer, Inventor"
www.yuni.com/quotes/kettering.html
“we have lost a vision of man. We are not sure how different he actually is from animal or vegetable or rock or mineral. It is partly, I think, because we have ceased trying to relate ourselves to God: we no longer even cry that God is dead; instead, we have named him an hypothesis, a dream, and turned him over to the laboratory to ‘prove.’ And because we have stopped searching for God we have stopped searching for ultimate meaning, saying there is no purpose in human existence. Hence all is absurdity, all is nothing. The more honest among those who want God ‘proved’ tend to seek uneasy solace in neo-nihilism; or, putting heart above logic, in humanism - while the less honest settle for their own brand of idol worship, sacrificing all to success or skin color or capitalism or communism or their work or their pleasure, whispering, Let’s don’t think about it.”
Lillian Smith Killers of the Dream
“Eugene Genovese once remarked that Joseph Schumpeter was ‘that rarest of all human creatures: an economist with a sense of tragedy.’”
Neil Cameron in Policy Options Vol. 21, #2 (March 2000)
In my latest National Post column I predict the policies the federal Tories will endorse in Halifax this weekend.
"How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the FORTUNE OF OTHERS, and render THEIR HAPPINESS necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it, except the pleasure of seeing it."
Adam Smith in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, quoted by Preston Manning in Fraser Forum July 2001 [a reprint of his address to the Fraser Institute Annual General Meeting].
"Nobody has a right to conduct a trade of which he is ashamed."
G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News May 2, 1936, quoted in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 7 #6 (April/May 2004)