“it is not probable that a man who is careless in small matters is careful in large ones; quite the contrary, a man who cannot even copy a sentence of Keynes’s correctly is not likely to be a reliable reporter of complicated or badly expressed ideas.”

George Stigler "On Scientific Writing” in The Intellectual and the Market Place and Other Essays [in support of a proposal that someone undertake a large-scale random verification of statements of empirical fact and of quotations from other writers in published economic articles]

In my latest National Post column I say the federal fiscal update didn’t misrepresent reality, it abandoned it entirely.

“It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages.”

Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations

He had not “acquired that command over his understanding which would enable him to believe what he wished without evidence”.

Thomas Robert Malthus, quoted by Antony Flew, ed., in the introduction to An Essay on the Principle of Population and A Summary view of the Principle of Population

In my latest Loonie Politics column I say the government’s inability to produce a COVID vaccine is just one sign of a plague of public sector ineptitude driven by ignorance of economics, utopian expectations and mental softness on our part as well as theirs that is far more dangerous than the coronavirus.

“The view that human beings are by nature good and reasonable creatures who can compose their differences peacefully is incompatible with what we know of human behavior in recorded history. It is starkly utopian.... Order can exist without justice and freedom, as we well know, but justice and freedom cannot exist without order.”

Sidney Hook in American Spectator July 1988

In the Epoch Times I argue that Justin Trudeau’s Canada Agenda 2030 isn’t part of some vast shadowy Great Reset plot, just a set of trendy progressive notions whose sweeping cosmic ambitions will succumb to their own vagueness and his chronic managerial incompetence.

“We do not claim that every normal individual always knows his or her own best interests but that no one else is likely to know them better. That is what Aristotle meant when he wrote that the wearer of shoes knows better than the cobbler whether a shoe pinches.”

William C. Mitchell and Randy T. Simmons Beyond Politics: Markets, Welfare, and the Failure of Bureaucracy