In my latest National Post column I say Britain needs a Tory victory because (a) Corbyn is a loathsome anti-Semite (b) democracy requires you to respect referendum results and (c) self-government requires a functioning parliament, which the UK hasn’t had since 2016.
“a... notion which Hayek has called the ‘synoptic delusion’.... is that a single person can hold in his mind all the facts relevant to some social problem.”
David G. Green Reinventing Civil Society: The Rediscovery of Welfare Without Politics
“All serious political and moral philosophy, and thus any serious social inquiry, must begin with an understanding of human nature. Though society and its institutions shape man, man’s nature sets limits on the kinds of societies we can have. Cicero said that the nature of law must be founded on the nature of man (a natura hominis discenda est natura juris).”
James Q. Wilson and Richard J. Herrnstein, Crime and Human Nature
In my latest National Post column I say Western alienation is a real problem with legitimate origins and needs serious action not mindless anger or mindless scorn.
“that scarce resource Love.”
Dennis Robertson, urging economists to find ways to minimize the demands public policy places on altruism, quoted in James Buchanan What Should Economists Do?
“You cannot legislate the poor into freedom by legislating the industrious out of it. You don’t multiply wealth by dividing it. Government cannot give anything to anybody that it doesn’t first take from somebody else. Whenever somebody receives something without working for it, somebody else has to work for it without receiving. The worst thing that can happen to a nation is for half of the people to get the idea they don’t have to work because somebody else will work for them, and the other half to get the idea that it does no good to work because they don’t get to enjoy the fruit of their labor.”
Adrian Pierce Rogers, Ten Secrets for a Successful Family (1996) (according to http://www.barrypopik.com/index.php/new_york_city/entry/you_cannot_multiply_wealth_by_dividing_it Rogers, a conservative American pastor and author who served three terms as president of the Southern Baptist Convention, is often credited with “You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it” but that formulation predates him and is of unknown origin).