“When Benjamin Franklin was seven years old... he fell in love with a whistle. He was so excited about it that he went into the toy shop, piled all his coppers on the counter, and demanded the whistle without even asking its price. ‘I then came home,’ he wrote to a friend 70 years later, ‘and went whistling all over the house, much pleased with my whistle.’ When his older brothers and sisters found out that he had paid far more for his whistle than he should have paid, they gave him the horse laugh; and, as he said: ‘I cried with vexation.’... But the lesson taught Franklin was cheap in the end. ‘As I grew up,’ he said, ‘and came into the world and observed the actions of men, I thought I met with many, very many, who gave too much for the whistle.’”

Dale Carnegie How to Stop Worrying and Start Living

On Wednesday I was on Alex Pierson’s show on Global News Radio 640, along with John Mraz, to discuss relief payments and job markets, COVID quarantine hotels, the notwithstanding clause and campaign finance, and more. A lively debate and fun was had by all.

In my latest Epoch Times column I point out that despite all the inane rhetoric about keeping out private health care as intolerable and un-Canadian, our system depends on it to function while doing its inept best to suppress it.

In my latest National Post column I say the unsuccessful experience with online learning during the pandemic is yet another argument for adopting a choice-driven, voucher/charter school educational system.

“The first man gets the oyster, the second man gets the shell.”

Andrew Carnegie (widely quoted online for instance at https://www.forbes.com/quotes/470/)

In my latest National Post column I say “This government doesn’t do hard” could become our new national motto as a vast cast of characters across the executive, legislative and judicial branches avoids thinking about difficult choices from COVID to national security and the budget.

“Revenge really does feel good… The [then just-published] Swiss brain-imaging study reveals how we draw satisfaction from teaching strangers a lesson when they have behaved badly... As the journal Science puts it, the study reveals what goes on in Dirty Harry’s head when ‘he succinctly informs a norm violator that he anticipates deriving satisfaction from inflicting altruistic punishment.’”

Ottawa Citizen August 27, 2004

“What comes first in intention comes last in execution.”

St. Thomas Aquinas, quoted by Pierre Trudeau in Thomas Axworthy and Pierre Trudeau, eds., Towards a Just Society