“Asked what the key thing is that poor countries should do, Cowperthwaite once remarked: ‘They should abolish the Office of National Statistics.’”
Alex Singleton’s obituary of former Hong Kong Financial Secretary John Cowperthwaite in Fraser Forum October 2006
In my latest Epoch Times column I warn that the Liberals are taking appalling risks in charging forward with hugely ambitious new projects from a crumbling economic and fiscal position.
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