In my latest Loonie Politics column I note the irony of people who spent decades destigmatizing everything and saying we should all do whatever we feel like now complaining that nowadays we all just do whatever we feel like.
“The obedient always think of themselves as virtuous rather than cowardly.”
Emailed to me and attributed to George Carlin, as it is in a number of places online (though one site attributed it to someone else), but none of them provide any detail as to when or where he supposedly said it. If anyone can do so, or knows it’s not really Carlin, please let me know.
“We have been driven into a widespread system of arbitrary and tyrannical control over our economic life not because ‘economic laws are not working the way they used to,’ not because the classical medicine cannot, if properly applied, halt inflation, but because the public at large has been led to expect standards of performance that as economists we do not know how to achieve.”
Milton Friedman’s 1971 address to American Economic Association quoted in Leonard Silk The Economists
“The same age which tends to economic slavery tends to social anarchy; and especially to sexual anarchy. So long as men can be driven in droves like sheep, they can be as promiscuous as sheep.”
G.K. Chesterton in G.K.’s Weekly March 9, 1929, quoted in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 #1 (Sept.-Oct. 2022)
In my latest Loonie Politics column I say a suggestion by a university psychologist, somewhat surprisingly, helps illuminate the frustrating way liberals and conservatives think, talk and shout past one another.
“I dread government in the name of science. That is how tyrannies come in.”
C.S. Lewis “Willing Slaves of the Welfare State: Is Progress Possible?” first published in The Observer July 20, 1958
“The product of over-civilisation is shamelessness.”
G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News May 2, 1908, quoted in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 #1 (9-10/22)
In my latest National Post column I ask whether Jagmeet Singh and other prominent Canadian politicians can possibly be the buffoons they appear to be, and answer sadly yes.