In my latest National Post column I say the great, and terrible, thing about capitalism is that what you find in stores is what we vote for with our dollars.
In my latest Loonie Politics column I mock the “experts say” meme reporters use to make liberal opinions sound like scientific fact.
In my latest National Post column I say the American boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics was a much better idea than I realized at the time, and we should do it again over Beijing in 2022 for much the same reasons.
“If we really do discount time positively, why does anyone ever eat their cake then their icing?”
OK, this one’s me again, from April 5, 2002, and possibly only interesting to economists.
In my latest Epoch Times column I say the now-routine desperate improvisation to avoid fiscal ruin is not going to end well in Washington, or here in Canada.
“The term nearest to being synonymous with pleasure is volition: what it pleases a man to do, or what he pleases to do, may be far from giving him enjoyment; yet shall we say that in doing it, he is not following his own pleasure?… A native of Japan, when he is offended, stabs himself to prove the intensity of his feelings. It is difficult to prove enjoyment in this case: yet the man obeyed his impulses.”
John Hill Burton, “Bentham’s editor”, quoted in I.A. Richards Principles of Literary Criticism and sourced to Jeremy Bentham’s Works, vol. I
In my latest Mercatornet column I say the mania for booster shots for vaccines that don’t work very well to stop a variant they may not work against at all is not science.
“An economic model of behaviour that lays any claim at all to predictive power must rely on the uniformity of human nature summarized in Homo economicus, or economic self-interest objectively defined. Such a model has served economists well; the model in all its variations explains much of what we know about the political-governmental sphere of human action in addition to the much more that we know and can explain about human action in market relationships… [and] yields meaningful predictions…”
“Constitutional revolution in Democracy” in Geoffrey Brennan and James M. Buchanan The Reason of Rules: Constitutional Political Economy