“But if ‘every man,’ as it has been written, ‘holds confined within him a mad-man,’ what must every Society do; - Society, which in its commonest state is called ‘the standing miracle of this world’! ‘Without such Earth-rind of Habit,’ continues our Author, ‘call it System of Habits, in a word, fixed ways of acting and believing, - Society would not exist at all.’”
Thomas Carlyle The French Revolution
In my latest National Post column I call Erin O’Toole’s flipflop on gun control a test case of whether populism, as one way of making the electoral system more responsive to popular wishes, actually brings better or more honest policy.
“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.
“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.”]
“The underlying cause of the dependent underclass… is a subset of that fact [Solzhenitsyn’s explanation of the Soviet nightmare “Man has forgotten God”]: ‘American policymakers have forgotten God.’”
Tom Bethell, quoting Marvin Olasky, in Turning Back the Welfare State: A Report on a Major Conference of the Claremont Institute (1994)
“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
In my latest Loonie Politics column I say the idea of national strategies where governments reform citizens is bad, including if one targets “Islamophobia”.