This week I was on the National Post “Full Comment” podcast with Brian Lilley to talk about Donald Trump, Canada, and the sometimes unruly revenge of normal people.
In my latest Epoch Times column I said the scariest thing about the current debate over social programs is that there isn’t one. We tried 30 years ago, realized it was hard, gave up and spent our way to economic and social ruin.
“Not to decide is to decide.”
Harvey Cox, quoted in J.W. Marriott Jr. and Kathi Ann Brown, The Spirit to Serve: Marriott’s Way.
In my latest National Post column I say the reason neither party can pull ahead in the American Presidential contest is that they’re both right about how awful their opponent is and dead wrong about how good their candidate is.
“Ambrose Bierce wrote of an inventor who built a moon rocket. When he fired it up, it bored straight down into the earth. A while later he crawled up out of the hole, and triumphantly announced, ‘My invention has proved correct in all its details; the defects are merely basic and fundamental!’ … whereupon the investors rushed forward to press money on him for the next attempt.”
Spider Robinson in Globe & Mail April 27, 1999
“The universal mark of ‘social reforms’ is the general attempt of the wealthy to get the needy well under their control.”
G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News Jan. 25, 1913, quoted in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 # 2 (Nov.-Dec. 2022)
In my latest Loonie Politics column I say ideas like digging a huge tunnel under the 401 to relieve traffic congestion by cramming in more cars, or more government funding for mortgages when houses are unaffordable, obtusely misses the point that if you let in half a million people a year you will overstrain everything from infrastructure to the housing industry to social cohesion.
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.