Posts in History
Been there, done that...

It gives me great pleasure to announce the first installment of “Been There, Done That… Shouldn’t Have”, a print and video commentary for the Economic Education Association of Alberta’s “Freedom Talk”. One of the most frustrating things about economic policy is we’re not even making new mistakes, just repeating old ones we forgot about. Sometimes so old they were first made in Latin. That’s why the focus of the series will be stories from economic history and, sometimes, mythology as well, to remind us that on at least 90 percent of the policies labeled bold and new we’ve been there, we’ve done that and we shouldn’t have. You can find them on the Freedom Talk site, of course, and we hope you’ll want to share them with your friends and help us keep the series going.

Canadian self-reliance

In my latest National Post column I talk about how odd it is that instead of Canadians mistrusting government, we now allow it to mistrust us. It doesn’t believe we can shop by ourselves, ride a bicycle or get in a boat safely, defend ourselves, speak freely without speech codes or build a deck without rules about the height of our railings. And instead of insisting that we know what we’re doing, too often we let it tell us what to do. In doing so we are losing our heritage. Servile incompetence is not a Canadian value. This country was built by self-reliant people who kept their governments in check, and it’s high time we went back to that arrangement.

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