In my latest Epoch Times column I say that an ideology, aka paradigm or worldview, is essential to coherent thought. So instead of the “I know you are but what am I?” spectacle of people trading cries of “ideologue” we should try to debate the reasons why we disagree about which evidence matters and what it says. And your goal should not be to avoid ideologies but to choose a sensible one.
In my latest National Post column I say the DND report on patriarchy invading the cosmos , while hilarious, reflects an pernicious ideology that destroys all productive enterprises from space exploration to defence procurement, and has wrecked governance in Canada.
“I believe most of the great social reforms of our time will remain in history as Follies.”
G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News June 3, 1919, quoted in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 # 4 (March-April 2023)
“... the whole way of life to which men are attached and the large ideas to which they own allegiance.”
Walt Rostow (in one of his books but my bibliographic note to self is incomprehensible)
“I do not find myself often agreeing with the late Lord Keynes, but he has never said a truer thing than when he wrote, on a subject on which his own experience has singularly qualified him to speak, that ‘the ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas. Not, indeed, immediately, but after a certain interval; for in the field of economic and political philosophy there are not many who are influenced by new ideas after they are twenty-five or thirty years of age, so that the ideas which civil servants and politicians and even agitators apply are not likely to be the newest. But soon or late, it is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good and evil.’”
Friedrich Hayek “‘Free’ Enterprise and Competitive Order” in Individualism and Economic Order
In my latest National Post column I warn that because ideas have consequences, and a powerful internal logic, progressive organizations that start with apparently non-controversial causes tend to slide into radical craziness, as with Ottawa’s Capital Pride that’s being boycotted even by Justin Trudeau because it’s so pro-Hamas and can’t stop itself.
In my latest Epoch Times column I remind people of Milton Friedman’s key insight that the real burden of government is what it spends, not the various devices from taxation to borrowing to printing money that it uses to fund, and often conceal this scope of, its activities and ambitions.
“Isn’t it unnerving that the person investing your money is called a ‘broker’?”
Van Allen Turner of the Upstream Restaurant and Richard Cilles of the Kingston Brewing Company according to Steve Madely in Ottawa Sun March 2, 1999