In my latest Loonie Politics column I welcome the youth of tomorrow’s future back to the dismal reality of today’s schooling with an assignment to write an essay on what they’d really do if they were in charge, and why it would be so different from what they promised and expected to do.
“Few are presumptuous enough to dispute with a chemist or mathematician upon points connected with the studies of labour of his life. But almost any man who can read and write feels at liberty to form and maintain opinions of his own upon trade and money …. The economic literature of every succeeding year embraces works conceived in the true scientific spirit, and works exhibiting the most vulgar ignorance of economic history and the most flagrant contempt for the conditions of economic investigation. It is much as if astrology were being pursued side by side with astronomy or alchemy with chemistry.”
Gen. Francis A. Walker, a professor at Yale and later president of M.I.T., quoted by Milton Friedman in CATO Policy Report Vol. XXI No. 2; another source on which my notes are culpably incomplete calls him “probably the most famous American economist of the nineteenth century” and director of two national censuses, which latter claim Wikipedia confirms, adding that he was wounded at Chancellorsville, fought in other battles, became a POW, was made a brevet brigadier general at age 24, and went on to a series of other achievements that make one wonder what one has done with one’s own life.
“My dad wasn’t lazy, he just had a genius for not considering the future.”
Audie Murphy, quoted in Edward F. Murphy, Heroes of World War II
“The Convoy Conference prior to our sailing was held ashore at Cardiff and was so particularly dull and uninformative that the Flag Officer Cardiff fell sound asleep. The Conference certainly had the merit that it could not possibly have alarmed the Masters of the merchant ships who were being briefed for the venture.”
Bob Whinney, The U-Boat Peril: A Fight for Survival (regarding a convoy that sailed on June 5 to help supply the U.S. beaches on D-Day).
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.
“I am unbelievably lucky: a. to be an American; b. To have my wife, the world’s finest human; c. To have never been severely or at least life-threateningly ill; d. To have never been in combat; e. To have had loving, caring, prosperous parents; f. To have an interesting, well-paid career; g. To have great friends, a great sister, nephew, niece, cousins, and, above all, son; h. Above all, to have learned to love and worship a God of love and understanding.”
“Benjamin J. Stein’s Diary” on his 60th birthday in The American Spectator February 2005
In my latest Epoch Times column I note the tragicomic contrast between the cosmic aspirations and vaulting self-regard of our politicians and their incapacity to discharge even basic functions of government.
“Men have no right to complain that they are naturally feeble and short-lived, or that it is chance and not merit that decides their destiny. On the contrary, reflection will show that nothing exceeds or surpasses the powers with which nature has endowed mankind, and that it is rather energy they lack than strength or length of days.”
Sallust, The Jugurthine War