In my latest National Post column I express the desire that Erin O’Toole base policy on principles and explain it in terms of them.
“The process of social life is a function of so many variables many of which are not amenable to anything like measurement that even mere diagnosis of a given state of things becomes a doubtful matter quite apart from the formidable sources of error that open up as soon as we attempt prognosis. These difficulties should not be exaggerated, however. We shall see that the dominant traits of the picture clearly support certain inferences which, whatever the qualifications that have to be added, are too strong to be neglected on the ground that they cannot be proved in the sense in which a proposition of Euclid’s can.”
Joseph Schumpeter Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy
In my latest Loonie Politics column I say Clive Hamilton and Mareike Ohlberg’s Hidden Hand: Exposing How the Chinse Communist Party is Reshaping the World is a badly needed wakeup call, especially in Canada.
In my latest Epoch Times column I say it’s a revealing and very scary totalitarian detail that the “People’s Liberation Army” is a branch of the Communist Party rather than the Chinese government (with h/t to Clive Hamilton and Mareike Ohlberg’s Hidden Hand: Exposing How the Chinese Communist Party is Reshaping the World for this disquieting fact).
“the observable phenomenon that trees don’t grow to the sky.”
John Dizard (“Gekko”) in National Review June 2, 1997 on the perils of projecting trends forward
“Milton Friedman: … There’s a phrase written on the entrance to one of the social sciences buildings at the University of Chicago, which is the statement … Rose Friedman: If you can’t measure it, measure it anyway. Milton Friedman: Actually, it was: ‘When you cannot measure something, your knowledge is meager and unsatisfying.’”
An Economic Freedom of the World network meeting in 2001, quoted in Fraser Forum May 2002.
“In truth, the problems facing France are difficult, but not profound.”
News story in Globe & Mail May 7, 2007