In my latest Mercatornet article I ask people who call themselves rational and civil to look at COVID-19 through some less politicized and more edifying lens than boo hiss down with Trump.
“I argue for a sober view of man and his institutions that would permit reasonable things to be accomplished, foolish things abandoned, and utopian things forgotten. A sober view of man requires a modest definition of progress.”
James Q. Wilson Thinking About Crime
In my latest National Post column I ask how we can be at yet another crucial “make or break” tipping point in the pandemic, and what exactly happens if we “make” it or fail to this time… and the next… and the next…
“The criminologist and sociologists are right, then, when they tell us that man is a ‘cooperating animal.’ But what they rarely realize is that cooperation only works if someone is willing to punish infractions. It must be done as a purely neutral phenomenon, with the punishment fitting the crime, not the criminal. Ideally, every individual should carry with him the remorseless sense that somewhere someone cares whether they break the law.”
William Tucker Vigilante: The Backlash Against Crime in America
In my latest Epoch Times column I remind Prime Minister Trudeau, just in case he has forgotten, that money is not wealth and that in handing out the former it is important not to lose sight of creating the latter.
“One can always tell when one is getting old and serious by the way that holidays seem to interfere with one’s work.”
“Bob Edwards in the Calgary Eye Opener, 1913” quoted as “Thought du jour” in Globe & Mail August 5, 2002
“We have to realize that the child’s world is without economic purpose. A child doesn’t understand – happy ignorance – that people are paid to do things. To a child the policeman rules the street for self-important majesty; the furnace man stokes the furnace because he loves the noise of falling coal and the fun of getting dirty; the grocer is held to his counter by the lure of aromatic spices and the joy of giving. And in this very ignorance there is a grain of truth. The child’s economic world may be the one that we are reaching out in vain to find. Here is a path in the wood of economics that some day might be followed to new discovery. Meantime, the children know it well and gather beside it their flowers of beautiful illusion.”
“War-Time Santa Claus” in Stephen Leacock On the Front Line of Life