Speaking of the fatuous appeal of radicalism to the young “I must include myself, since I was a young Marxist.” But “What forced me to change my mind [away from radicalism] was discovering over the years that things were even worse than I thought. People did awful things, not just here but all around the world, not just now but across thousands of years of history…. History was especially disillusioning. It showed that some of my pet ideas had already been tried, and had blown up in people’s faces.”

Thomas Sowell Is Reality Optional?

“That [President George W. Bush saying price controls wouldn’t solve California’s energy problems], sniffed last Sunday’s New York Times, was just ‘Econ 101.’ What the President needed was a lesson in Econ 90210, presented by the Department of Sarah Polley-Sci.”

Peter Foster in National Post June 8, 2001

In my latest Epoch Times column I say the world tour for which our Prime Minister skipped Remembrance Day is, like everything he does, all about him.

In my latest Loonie Politics column I urge all politicians to ponder, if their adversaries are as awful as they claim and they are so marvelous, why it is that voters do not elect them in a landslide at every opportunity.

In my latest Mercatornet column I say the U.S. midterms show once again the fatuity of seeking salvation through elections.

“Treat people as if they were what they ought to be and you help them to become what they are capable of being.”

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, quoted in J.W. Marriott Jr. and Kathi Ann Brown, The Spirit to Serve: Marriott’s Way.

In my latest Epoch Times column I say the arrogance behind the Prime Minister’s sneering refusal to admit he’s the one who stayed in that $6k/night London hotel suite is a major problem in Canadian public affairs.

“One of the most popular supposed short cuts is imagining that we can make our decisions easier by bypassing value judgments and assigning numbers to everything. Call this the numerical fallacy, or the fallacy of false precision. I’m not saying that it’s never useful to count things.... if a lot of people are out of work, I want some idea of how many, and if prices are going up, I want some idea of how much. The problem is that we rely on numbers too much, too carelessly, for too many things, and we trust them far more than we should. Excessive trust in numbers is part of the technocratic ideology which supposes that government by experts is not political.... There just isn’t a way of generating measurements that isn’t based on value judgments. The only question is which value judgments it depends on, and how transparently or obscurely it depends on them.... Fortunately, there is an instrument for making judgments: The human mind. And there is a way to calibrate it: Experience, deliberation, debate, and the cultivation of practical wisdom. Sorry, but there aren’t any short cuts.”

J. Budziszewski “Underground Thomist” Dec. 27, 2021 [https://www.undergroundthomist.org/the-technocratic-fallacy-of-false-precision].