In my latest Loonie Politics column I ask how somebody as smart as Bill Morneau can be so idiotic about the nation’s finances.
“‘The prejudices of some political writers against shopkeepers and tradesmen, are altogether without foundation. So far is it from being necessary, either to tax them, or to restrict their numbers, that they can never be multiplied so as to hurt the public, though they may so as to hurt one another.’”
Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations, quoted in H.B. Action The Morals of Markets and Related Essays.
In my latest National Post column I say it’s high time a parliamentary committee looked into China’s repression and aggression… and our government’s odd blindness to it.
“For ‘tis not barely the plough-man's pains, the reaper's and thresher's toil, and the baker's sweat, [that] is to be counted into the bread we eat; the labour of those who broke the oxen, who digged and wrought the iron and stones, who felled and framed the timber employed about the plough, mill, oven, or any other utensils, which are a vast number, requisite to this corn, from its being feed to be sown to its being made bread, must all be charged on the account of labour, and received as an effect of that… ‘Twould be a strange catalogue of things, that industry provided and made use of, about every loaf of bread, before it came to our use, if we could trace them; iron, wood, leather, bark, timber, stone, bricks, coals, lime, cloth, dyeing-drugs, pitch, tar, masts, ropes, and all the materials made use of in the ship, that brought any of the commodities made use of by any of the workmen, to any part of the work; all which it would be almost impossible, at least too long, to reckon up.”
John Locke The Second Treatise of Government (anticipating Leonard Read’s “I Pencil” by a quarter of a millennium)
In BOE Report I argue that even a would-be economically sensible defence of carbon taxes from the Ecofiscal Commission totally misses the key economic point that, because there are no good substitutes for gas, if you raise the price then give the money back in rebates people will use it to afford more expensive gas, and if you don’t give it back they’ll economize on other things to afford more expensive gas.
In my latest Loonie Politics column I deplore the predictable vacuity of the premiers’ gathering in Toronto to ask for… wait for it… more money from the federal government’s magic money try to sustain health care so nobody has to think about fixing it.
“a... notion which Hayek has called the ‘synoptic delusion’.... is that a single person can hold in his mind all the facts relevant to some social problem.”
David G. Green Reinventing Civil Society: The Rediscovery of Welfare Without Politics