NB this interview was done before the government said it would pay Admiral Norman’s legal bills. But I stand by my claim that the ordeal he went through, including having to fund the case himself while it was in progress and with no reasonable expectation that his bills would be covered, constitutes a powerful deterrent to anyone rocking the boat or, in this case, the supply ship..

In my latest National Post column I say the real crisis in Canadian public health care is that we aren’t willing to consider that it’s working badly because we’re doing it wrong.

“Everything Milton [Friedman] touches has the feel of his optimism…”

William F. Buckley, Jr. in National Review July 18, 2005 [at which point Friedman was 93]

In a piece in C2C Journal that I forgot to post at the time, I argue that social licence sounds good, or did until we discovered you couldn’t get one. But in fact it’s just another way of saying “tyranny of the majority” which is bad in principle and worse in practice because it means mob rule by a fanatical minority

“There are, in the last resort, no economic ends. The economic efforts of the individuals as well as the services which the market order renders to them, consist in an allocation of means for the competing ultimate purposes which are always non-economic. The task of all economic activity is to reconcile the competing ends by deciding for which of them the limited means are to be used.”

Friedrick Hayek, Law, legislation and Liberty, Vol. 2: The Mirage of Social Justice

In my latest Loonie Politics column I critique the New York Times and similar outlets for saying Benjamin Netanyahu couldn’t win the Israeli election, then that he wasn’t winning, and then that he only won because Israeli voters are horribly right wing, and instead tell their readers why Netanyahu, Trump and others appeal to so many people who don’t read the New York Times.