In my latest National Post column, I write to Santa listing things I could really do without this year… and they all come from the government.

“Liberty is traditional and conservative; it remembers its legends and its heroes. But tyranny is always young and seemingly innocent, and asks us to forget the past.”

G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News December 30, 1911, quoted in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 #5 (May/June 2022)

In my latest Epoch Times column I say the scathing inquiry into Ottawa’s light rail transit debacle, and the scattering of those responsible clutching large pensions, proves what I’ve been saying about megaprojects for years.

“I believe a man is happier, and happy in a richer way, if he has ‘the freeborn mind’. But I doubt whether he can have this without economic independence, which the new society is abolishing. For economic independence allows an education not controlled by Government; and in adult life it is the man who needs, and asks, nothing of Government who can criticise its acts and snap his fingers at its ideology.”

C.S. Lewis God in the Dock quoted by Martin Capages Jr. on Substack [https://martincapagesjrphdpe.substack.com/p/c-s-lewis-on-climate-change-and-the]

“An acquaintance, hearing someone speculate that some of the advocates of defunding the police may be less than transparent about their motives, asked, ‘Isn’t that just a conspiracy theory?’ Another fellow I spoke with reacted to someone’s suggestion that not all sexual acts are morally equivalent by demanding, ‘Isn’t that just homophobia?’ And a student responded to the reasoning of a religious author by sneering, ‘Isn’t that just a religious argument?’ What’s I find interesting is that although all three persons thought they were heading off fallacies, actually all three were committing them. The kinds they committed were fallacies of distraction. Each one deflected the question instead of considering it, then considered the deflection a rebuttal. My acquaintance didn’t inquire into whether the people in question really were concealing their motives – much less whether someone who suggests concealment is necessarily suggesting cooperation in the concealment – much less whether anyone ever does conceal his motives – much less whether anyone ever does cooperate in the act – much less whether that could have been happening in the case at hand. The second fellow didn’t consider whether the motive for making a suggestion automatically disqualifies it – much less whether the only possible motive for making moral distinctions among sexual acts is a pathological fear or ‘phobia’ – much less whether all such acts really are morally equivalent. And the student didn’t reflect upon whether the religious writer’s argument really was premised on his faith – much less whether an argument might be valid even if it were premised on faith – much less whether the argument at hand was valid. I sometimes hear that people need more training in formal inference. Maybe so. But we have a much greater need to learn about ‘informal’ fallacies, errors that occur not because we violate the rules of inference but because we are distracted from the point we are discussing.”

J. Budziszewski “The Underground Thomist” December 9 2021

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.