In my latest National Post column I warn that because ideas have consequences, and a powerful internal logic, progressive organizations that start with apparently non-controversial causes tend to slide into radical craziness, as with Ottawa’s Capital Pride that’s being boycotted even by Justin Trudeau because it’s so pro-Hamas and can’t stop itself.
In my latest Epoch Times column I remind people of Milton Friedman’s key insight that the real burden of government is what it spends, not the various devices from taxation to borrowing to printing money that it uses to fund, and often conceal this scope of, its activities and ambitions.
“The history of mankind is the history of ideas.”
Ludwig von Mises Planned Chaos [1st sentence of “The Liberation of the Demons”]
“The whole conscious and subconscious trend of modernism is the distrust, and even the detestation, of the ordinary man.”
G.K. Chesterton in New Witness March 9, 1916, quoted in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 # 4 (March-April 2023)
In a talk to the 2024 Economic Education Association of Alberta "Freedom Talk" in Red Deer, AB on July 7 I argue that a radical commitment to truth-telling, including refusing to remain silent in the face of lies, is crucial to personal and to political freedom.
“No sooner has a man’s conscience told him to doubt a certain institution than the man’s modern intelligence immediately tells him to doubt his conscience. Thus most modern revolution is in secret revolt against itself.”
G.K. Chesterton in Daily News Nov. 17 1906, quoted in “Intelligence” in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 # 6 (July-August 2023)
“There [St. Peter’s Chapel in the Tower of London, where they bury at least some of the illustrious persons executed in the Tower] has mouldered away the headless trunk of John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester and Cardinal of Saint Vitalis, a man worthy to have lived in a better age, and died in a better cause.”
Thomas Babington Macaulay The History of England
“Internationalism is the death of democracy.”
G.K. Chesterton in The (NY) Sun Oct. 20 1918, quoted in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 # 2 (Nov.-Dec. 2022)