“Economic activists are not irrational. When they are punished for success, they avoid success. When they are rewarded for success, they act more creatively.”
Robert Novak Will It Liberate?
“‘The idea that going to the beach was good for you was a creation of 18th-century Britain,’ writes Charles Leadbeater in Prospect magazine. ‘Entrepreneurs keen to promote an alternative to the spa hit upon the idea that immersing people in cold salty water might be healthy. One of the first recorded bathing expeditions took to the North Sea at Scarborough in 1627. A century later, a string of seaside alternatives to the spas at Bath and Buxton were well established. Before that, beaches had been regarded as hostile places, at best a working space for people who made their living from the sea: fishermen, smugglers, wreckers. Swimming for pleasure, and sunbathing, were unheard of.’”
“Social Studies” in Globe & Mail September 15, 2004
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.