"History, alas, has a way of hanging on."
Walter Russell Mead, Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World
In my latest National Post column I say the solution to mean-spirited echo chambers and fake news online is in the mirror.
In my latest National Post column I say the mass shooting at a Texas church does not validate arguments for gun control.
My latest Looniepolitics column says the surprising defeat of Montreal mayor Denis Coderre should have us paying more attention to Canada's cities.
"you cannot build prescriptions on mere knowledge of positive facts, however systematized and comprehensive. You need a goal as well... it is all very well to know how the world works... But unless you have some test whereby you can distinguish good from bad, desirable consequences from undesirable, you are without an essential constituent of a theory of policy. You are like the captain of a ship equipped with charts and compasses and all the means of propulsion and steering, but without an assigned destination. A theory of economic policy, in the sense of a body of precepts for action, must take its ultimate criterion from outside economics."
Lionel Robbins The Theory of Economic Policy in English Classical Political Economy pp. 176-77.
In my latest National Post column I argue against making the tax code even more complicated and unfair by extending charitable status in pursuit of social engineering.
"This study is an attempt to tell them that, not only is the Emperor naked, but his body is hardly a thing of beauty."
William Stanbury in Fraser Forum August 1998 [the actual topic was CanCon regulations, but the statement is apt surprisingly often]
Especially in his speeches and lectures Ludwig von Mises "would emphasize again and again that interventionist policies are 'wrong,' not from the point of view of the economist himself, but from the point of view of those initiating these policies (or at least from the point of view of those whose well-being the policies are supposed to enhance)."
Israel M. Kirzner in Edwin G. Dolan, ed., The Foundations of Modern Austrian Economics