“It is not only that man wants to be free; it is that he must have pride in his work and be fairly recompensed for its value – or sooner rather than later he will simply cease to be productive no matter what pressures are applied to make him work.”

Thibaut de Saint Phalle, Trade, Inflation, and the Dollar

In 1890 Swedish economist Knut Wicksell “argued that if governments ran deficits then citizens were not being clear information about the costs and benefits of programmes which they were being asked to support as voters… If much of the cost could be transferred to a subsequent generation, citizens would select more government expenditure than if they had to carry the true costs of the benefits they received. This commitment to a balanced budget was not as naïve or rigid as some modern commentators like to suggest.”

Roger Douglas Unfinished Business

“Strong reciprocators are not altruists.... They’re rejecting lowball offers because the offers violate their individual sense of what a just exchange would be. But the effect is the same as if they loved humanity… Individually irrational acts, in other words, can produce a collectively rational outcome.”

James Surowiecki The Wisdom of Crowds [regarding experiments involving the “ultimatum game”]

“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/)