In my latest Epoch Times column I explain why we talk a lot less about free speech than we used to, and a lot less convincingly.
In my latest Epoch Times column I say it’s predictable that the latest expensive troubles for Ottawa’s megaproject O-Train weren’t predicted.
“Robert Reich, President Clinton’s labour secretary, said that economists who question free market theories really ‘want to speak to the reality of our time.’ That’s incredible. Reality doesn’t depend on whether it’s 1907 or 2007. Reich probably thinks the reality of the laws of supply and demand depends on what year it is. I wonder whether he thinks the reality of the laws of gravity does as well.”
Walter E. Williams in Fraser Forum July-August 2007
In my latest Epoch Times column I wax nostalgic about the days when people pretended they’d read books I didn’t want to, instead of admitting they don’t read.
“You don’t have to be cruel to be tough.”
Franklin D. Roosevelt, quoted as standalone “WORDS OF WISDOM” in Epoch Times email February 4, 2022
In my latest National Post column I say the vehemence of the reaction to Pierre Poilievre, like his own rhetoric, reflects not the vast policy and philosophical differences in Canadian politics but their pettiness.
“The most common doubt about economists stems from their apparent inability to agree, best captured by George Bernard Shaw’s line that ‘if all economists were laid end to end, they would not reach a conclusion. But economists’ hard-core detractors recognize the superficiality of this complaint. They know that economists regularly see eye-to-eye with one another. A quip from Steven Kelman directly contradicts Shaw: ‘The near-unanimity of the answers economists give to public policy questions, highly controversial among the run of intelligent observers, but which share the characteristic of being able to be analyzed in terms of microeconomic theory, reminds one of the unanimity characterizing bodies such as the politburo of the Soviet Communist Party.’ It is not lack of consensus that incenses knowledgeable critics, but the way economists unite behind unpalatable conclusions, such as doubts about the benefits of regulation.”
Bryan Caplan, “The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies,” Cato Policy Analysis #594 (May 29, 2007)
In my latest Epoch Times column I say people arguing over whether government in Canada is “broken” should devise a checklist of the attributes of a genuinely broken government and then see how many of them we’ve got.