In my latest Epoch Times column I say the big issue in this Canadian federal election is that the political business-as-usual of hypocrisy and profligacy is not good enough.

“L’intérêt met en oeuvre toutes sortes de vertus et de vices.”

Réflexions morales #253 in La Rochefoucauld Maximes

“What if lawyers and economists wrote the sitcoms? Very likely, they would turn out so that they more closely approximated the agony and pain of real life, which is really so frightening that it simply has to be funny.”

An author whose name I did not record in The American Spectator August 1988

In my latest National Post column I call Erin O’Toole’s flipflop on gun control a test case of whether populism, as one way of making the electoral system more responsive to popular wishes, actually brings better or more honest policy.

“I can listen patiently to a Communist repeating for hours at a time that Property is unnecessary, because men must surrender selfish interests to social ideals. I only begin to break the furniture when somebody starts to prove that Property is necessary, because men are all selfish and every man must look after himself. The case for Property is not that a man must look after himself; but, on the contrary, that a normal man has to look after other people, if it be simply a wife and family. It is that this unit should have an economic basis for its social independence. If he were considering only himself, he might be more independent as a vagabond; he might be more secure as a serf. But the point at the moment is that I like Property because it is a noble thing. I can respect the revolutionist who dislikes it because it is an ignoble thing. But I have no truck with the cynic who likes it because it is ignoble.”

G.K. Chesterton in “The New Dark Ages” in G.K.’s Weekly May 21, 1927, quoted in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 9 # 8, Issue 73 (July-August 2006)

In my latest Loonie Politics column I say it’s not surprising for an unprincipled Red Tory to join in the orgy of vote-buying at the expense of the last vestige of conservatism. But it won’t end well for the nation.

In my latest National Post column I argue that the solution to toxic anger in politics, far easier said than done, is neither to cause nor succumb to it.

“Mr. [Mark] Kingwell’s jaundiced view is ultimately based on that non-existent wraith, ‘economic man,’ a lobotomized Scrooge on a shopping spree.”

Peter Foster in National Post February 12, 1999