In my latest Mercatornet article I say that what matters in the upcoming U.S. election is not what the people involved would have you focus on.
“Lord Salisbury’s observation that ‘no lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust in experts’”
Michael Mandelbaum in New York Times June 16, 1985 [and widely quoted online but not, in any examples I found, with further attribution as to when or where Salisbury said it].
“‘Those who can, do,’ but the converse, ‘those who do, can,’ is no less true, for we learn by doing.”
Anthony De Jasay The State (expressly regarding the possibility that we couldn’t spontaneously cooperate any more because we’ve lived under governments for so long).
In my latest Epoch Times column I call the rather vague Wall Street Journal article about a U.S. government report on the COVID lab leak theory very good news because it means the possibility is being debated not cancelled.
“Again, the new oligarchy must more and more base its claim to plan us on its claim to knowledge. If we are to be mothered, mother must know best. This means they must increasingly rely on the advice of scientists, till in the end the politicians proper become merely the scientists’ puppets. Technocracy is the form to which a planned society must tend. Now I dread specialists in power because they are specialists speaking outside their special subjects. Let scientists tell us about sciences. But government involves questions about the good for man, and justice, and what things are worth having at what price; and on these a scientific training gives a man’s opinion no added value.”
Martin Capages Jr. on substack [https://martincapagesjrphdpe.substack.com/p/c-s-lewis-on-climate-change-and-the] quoting C.S. Lewis God in the Dock [https://books.google.ca/books?id=loE7BAAAQBAJ&pg=PA350&lpg=PA350&dq]
In my latest Epoch Times column I say it’s actually good news that about two-thirds of Canadians in a poll said they think “everything is broken in this country right now” because we still expect better and have not spiraled into rage, paranoia or, worst of all, resignation.
In my latest Epoch Times column I contrast the Canadian federal government’s sluggish incapacity even to agree to hand out cash to get other people to build houses with the endless vaulting promises of our politicians to deliver social justice, world peace and better weather.
“I try to enthuse my patients with the glory of the world, with indifferent success, I must admit. It is almost as if they wanted the world to be boring, to justify their own lack of interest in it. To be bored and disabused is taken by many people nowadays as a sign of spiritual election or superiority, as if the world does not quite come up to their exacting standards.”
Theodore Dalrymple in National Post December 27, 2003