“theories [should] be examined for their implications for observable behaviour, and these specific implications compared with observable behaviour.”
George Stigler in 1950, quoted in Steven N.S. Cheung, The Myth of Social Cost: A critique of welfare economics and the implications for public policy (Hobart Paper 82 from the Institute for Economic Affairs, 1979)
Here’s a video from the past. It’s a talk I gave at the Augustine College Summer Seminar in June 2019 so I’m tardy making it available. And it’s about the Middle Ages which were, far too many people think, necessarily awful because they were long ago and old is bad and new is good. In fact there are a great many modern horrors that would have appalled people in the Middle Ages and one of them is widespread ignorance about the period.
Sorry to take so long to get around to editing and posting it. Life got in the way.
On Jan. 6 I was on CTV Ottawa’s “Morning Live” show along with David Shackleton, Executive Director of the Canadian Centre for Men and Families - Ottawa, and Nakita of the Adult Fun Superstore, to talk about our work and the AFS’s “Double the Love” fundraising campaign for our Centre in January.
Please watch, share and consider making a donation, through the AFS or directly via our website.
In my latest Epoch Times column I say the danger a new pandemic poses to our crumbling health care system shows that getting incentives wrong isn’t some dry economic concept, it’s a clear and present danger to our health as well as our finances.
“Above all, we must insist, as against the utopian concepts, that a tolerable order of things is one of a proper balance between the social and the individual: that a human being is neither an ant nor a shark.”
Introduction in Robert Conquest Reflections on a Ravaged Century
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