“Armen Alchain once made a very important comment. He said, ‘You know, there is one thing you can trust everybody to do. You can trust everybody to put his interest above yours.’”
Milton Friedman “Economic Freedom, Human Freedom, Political Freedom.” (Inaugural address of The Smith Center November 1 1991”
“We must take human nature as we find it. Perfection falls not to the share of mortals.”
George Washington to John Jay August 8, 1786, in W.B. Allen Washington, George. A Collection.
“Most people most of the time find it impossible to argue for any sustained period against their own manifest best interests.”
William C. Mitchell and Randy T. Simmons Beyond Politics: Markets, Welfare, and the Failure of Bureaucracy
In my latest Loonie Politics column I give thanks that Canada is blessed with sages capable of devising the brilliantly original solution to our health care crisis of spending tons more cash from Ottawa’s magic money tree.
In my latest National Post column I say the outrageous way the Chinese government speaks about the outrageous things it does is a red flag about the outrageous way it thinks.
“In their political arrangements, men have no right to put the well-being of the present generation wholly out of the question. Perhaps the only moral trust with any certainty in our hands is the care of our own time. With regard to futurity, we are to treat it like a ward. We are not so to attempt an improvement of his fortune as to put the capital of his estate at risk.”
Edmund Burke An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs
In my latest Epoch Times column I say the Finance Minister is not plotting to steal our savings, just proclaiming her intention to do something so hopelessly confused not even she knows what it is.
“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]