“If it were not for lawyers, we wouldn’t need them.”
– A.K. Giffin in The New Official Rules, quoted as “Thought du jour” in “Social Studies” in Globe & Mail June 18, 2007
In my latest Loonie Politics column I note the irony of people who spent decades destigmatizing everything and saying we should all do whatever we feel like now complaining that nowadays we all just do whatever we feel like.
“Quick, who said this? ‘(C)itizens, you are all first of all equal among yourselves, and your rights take priority over those of the state. The collectivity is not the bearer of rights: it receives the rights it exercises from the citizens.’ ‘A: Ronald Reagan. B: Donald Trump, or C: Pierre Trudeau?’ ‘Answer, C: Pierre Trudeau.’”
Mark Milke on Twitter August 11, 2022 [https://twitter.com/MilkeMark/status/1557747155456049152?t=bhSDdLbXvVXsEuzj-1hE-w&s=09] encouraging us to “See my column on Canada’s tradition of freedom. https://bit.ly/3BZAfJR”
In my latest Epoch Times column I say special rapporteur David Johnston’s report on the Liberal response to communist Chinese election meddling is what Justin Trudeau hoped for, but not what he or any of us needed.
“The obedient always think of themselves as virtuous rather than cowardly.”
Emailed to me and attributed to George Carlin, as it is in a number of places online (though one site attributed it to someone else), but none of them provide any detail as to when or where he supposedly said it. If anyone can do so, or knows it’s not really Carlin, please let me know.
In my latest Epoch Times column I say Bill Blair’s smug stonewalling over the latest allegations of long delays in approving a warrant show that the federal Liberals are still flailing as this breaking scandal moves faster than they can Observe, Orient, Decide and Act.
In my latest National Post column I say the tricksy maneuvering over the U.S. debt ceiling, in which the one problem no one seems able address is chronic overspending, reminds me uncomfortably of late ancien régime France.
“We have been driven into a widespread system of arbitrary and tyrannical control over our economic life not because ‘economic laws are not working the way they used to,’ not because the classical medicine cannot, if properly applied, halt inflation, but because the public at large has been led to expect standards of performance that as economists we do not know how to achieve.”
Milton Friedman’s 1971 address to American Economic Association quoted in Leonard Silk The Economists