In my latest Epoch Times column I say the answer to declining social trust, including on COVID lockdowns and vaccines, isn’t to shame and silence people, it’s to have an intelligent and respectful discussion. Which apparently now makes me a kook.

In my latest Loonie Politics column I say the inflation currently breaking out because we printed too much money and produced too little wealth is a classic case of Hemingway’s line about going broke two ways.

“If persons do not behave in accordance with their own economic self-interest, objectively defined and measured, on what basis do they act?... The economist is well-equipped to recognize mush for what it is, and when noneconomists hypothesize that persons want to ‘do good,’ he quickly detects the absence of predictive content.”

“Is Constitutional Revolution Possible in Democracy?” in Geoffrey Brennan and James M. Buchanan The Reason of Rules: Constitutional Political Economy

In my latest Epoch Times column I use Neil Winokur’s book The Grumpy Accountant to lament that Canada’s tax system has been outrageously and needlessly complicated and harsh for many decades. Why do we let them do it to us?

“Once the memory of the past grows dim, we will forget who we are and why we exist as a people. Poised ready to relish the pleasure of the moment, without regard for how we became a free society, we risk losing all.”

Solveig Eggerz in Joseph Baldacchino Educating for Virtue

“‘The effect of liberty to individuals is, that they may do what they please,’ wrote Edmund Burke, the hero of American conservatives, ‘we ought to see what it will please them to do, before we risk congratulations.’”

David Frum Dead Right

“Surely what matters in a dogma – religious, political or any other kind – is not the motive of those who advance it, but whether it is true or false.”

Ted and Virginia Byfield in “Orthodoxy” in British Columbia Report August 18, 1997

“Saying the problem with a major government intervention wasn’t socialism but bad pricing decisions is like saying the Hindenburg was a success except for the fire.”

Here I quote myself from June 3, 2002 in reaction to former Energy Minister Marc Lalonde making some such excuse about the National Energy Program