In my latest National Post column I say the worst thing about the Liberals’ doctored video showing Erin O’Toole supporting more private options in health care is that there’s no way it could possibly be true.
“It is far more difficult to form an informed opinion about what is good for society as a whole than it is to determine where one’s self-interest lies.”
Judge Richard Posner, apparently in Law, Pragmatism, and Democracy, quoted in James Surowiecki The Wisdom of Crowds
In my latest Loonie Politics column I lament that far too many voters still believe politicians can shower them with free money and not germinating a nasty crop of debt and inflation instead of wealth and social services.
In my latest Epoch Times column I say our constitution has deteriorated so far into populism that elections are no longer about issues, only who gets unchecked power until the next vote.
“Is there a possibility that the government of nations may fall into the hands of men who teach the most disconsolate of all creeds, that men are but fireflies, and that this all is without a father?”
John Quincy Adams, in the Letters of Publicola, quoted in Russell Kirk The Conservative Mind [Kirk added that the specific target was Thomas Paine and that Adams went on that rather than such an outcome “Give us again the gods of the Greeks.”]
“A hasty general is the worst of generals nowadays; the best is a sort of von Moltke, who is passive if any man ever was passive; who is ‘silent in seven languages’…”
Walter Bagehot Physics and Politics
“L’humilité n’est souvent qu’une feinte soumission, dont on se sert pour soumettre les autres; c’est un artifice de l’orgueil qui s’abaisse pour s’élever; et bien qu’il se transforme en mille manières, il n’est jamais mieux déguisé et plus capable de tromper que lorsqu’il se cache sous la figure de l’humilité.”
Réflexions morales #254 in La Rochefoucauld Maximes
“You can no more evade in politics the question, What is true in religion? than you can do sums right without prejudice to a difference of opinion upon the multiplication table.”
James Fitzjames Stephen, Liberty Equality Fraternity