In my latest National Post column I suggest that punk rockers and other postmoderns hate and love big government because we've done the Nietzche transvaluation thing. Choice doesn't mean deciding between existing alternatives including right and wrong anymore. Now it means dictating what alternatives should exist and deciding for ourselves what shall be right. Conformity can be rebellion, awful art can be great, big can be small, down can be up, anything we like. Or so we like to think.

So here's a happy story. We had a great time at Universal Orlando Resort a few weeks ago but, in what I expect is an all-too-common end-of-day experience, a happily exhausted kid lost a souvenir Ollivanders wand on a shuttle bus. And now it's back. Having contacted Universal to express appreciation over an unrelated matter during our visit, I decided to ask whether anyone happened to find it and turn it in. No one had. But Universal insisted on sending a replacement free of charge anyway. (A Hermione Granger model, if you're curious. And yes, Diagon Alley is well worth a visit. So small from the outside, so big from the inside. Almost like... magic.) And yesterday a courier package arrived with the wand in it.

What great customer service, on top of excellent rides and other attractions.

Thanks, Universal. Or in the spirit of Harry Potter, vobis gratias ago.

"We can’t always be happy, but we must strive always to be cheerful." Irving Kristol

"I believe in an open mind, but not so open that your brains fall out." Arthur Hays Sulzberger

Here’s one I do like. On February 27, 1782, the British House of Commons voted to throw in the towel in the American Revolutionary War.

I like it partly because my sympathies are very much with the revolutionaries seeking to uphold their ancient British liberties, not with the King and his ministers trying to suppress them. And I like it partly because I can think of few greater affirmations of those liberties that, in such a difficult and embarrassing situation, it was the representatives of the British people who took the king by his frilly collar and said "Stop!" Once again, Parliament checked an expensive, oppressive hare-brained executive branch scheme which was, in large measure, the point of the British constitution essentially from Magna Carta onward.

This vote was no formality. Far from it. The King remained an important player in the British system even when he was obviously messing up badly. And despite the highly unfavourable state of the military effort in what had recently been the 13 Colonies after the crushing British defeat at Yorktown by a combined American-French force, the February 27 1782 vote was close, 234 to 215. And that narrow 19-vote margin was very important.

It set in motion a highly favourable chain of events leading to quick reconciliation between the former belligerents. Including that the American peace commissioners, the exalted trio of Benjamin Franklin, John Adams and John Jay, proceeded to make a separate peace with Britain despite pledges to France, which had swooped on her old foe, not to do so.

Within an amazingly short period, and despite the stupid War of 1812, Britain and the United States were tacit allies in maintaining world order, an arrangement that persisted from the 1824 Monroe Doctrine with some bumps and bruises right down to their formal alliance in 1917. And while it took statesmanship to bring it about and maintain it, the structural basis was their shared devotion to liberty under law and to popular sovereignty. With, of course, the usual qualifications about unjust exclusion of some groups from the blessings of liberty, most spectacularly in the United States black slaves and then ex-slaves.

In the Capitol Rotunda in Washington there is a gold replica of Magna Carta that we were kindly permitted to film in 2015, given by the British Parliament in 1976 in powerful acknowledgement that two centuries earlier the greatest devotees of traditional freedom and the rights of the people had been on the west side of the Atlantic. But they were still strongly represented in Britain including in Parliament on that important date.

Liberty is often under siege. But where the roots are deep, it has enormous strength and manages to flourish despite and sometimes even during storms. Including Parliament yanking George III back to his so-called senses on behalf of ordinary Britons on February 27, 1782.

"The certainty of a God giving a meaning to life far surpasses in attractiveness the ability to behave badly with impunity. The choice would not be hard to make. But there is no choice, and that is where the bitterness comes in. The absurd does not liberate; it binds. It does not authorize all actions. 'Everything is permitted' does not mean that nothing is forbidden. The absurd merely confers an equivalence on the consequences of those actions." Albert Camus "The Absurd Man" in The Myth of Sisyphus & Other Essays

On this date back in 1616, February 26, the Catholic Church made its infamous effort to undo Joshua 10:12 and make the sun move in the sky. Or at least it ordered Galileo to shut up about the fact that it made far more sense to regard the Earth as in motion around a stationary sun. Confirming once again Robert Conquest’s 3rd Law of Politics: "The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies." Because to this day almost nothing seems to confirm the beliefs of anti-Catholics that the Church is repressive and obscurantist than this episode.

In my view the charge is not entirely fair. Even when it comes to science, the Catholic Church has very often taken very sensible views, in the spirit of Cesare Cardinal Baronio whose comment about the controversy was "The Bible teaches us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go." But this episode with Galileo is the one that sticks in the popular mind.

And for what? After silencing Galileo the Church went on to ban all books advocating the Copernican system as "altogether contrary to Holy Scripture". Galileo himself was unrepentant and despite formally accepting the 1616 decree went on to publish his devastating Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems which earned him a trial for heresy in 1633. And a conviction, and house arrest for the rest of his life.

The sun, you’ll notice, didn’t escape from the stationary position relative to our solar system to which Galileo had assigned it. (It is splitting hairs to argue today, as some do, that the Church was sort of right because the sun does move relative to other stars. The problem was declaring astronomy a branch of theology.)

A mere 122 years later, in 1758, the Church dropped the ban on heliocentric books without actually reversing the verdict against Galileo or allowing uncensored version of Copernicus’ key work De Revolutionibus orbium coelestium or Galileo’s Dialogue. Not until 1820 did the Church go "Ooops" for real and lift the ban on the two books, and a mere 15 years later a revised Index of Forbidden Books no longer listed them.

Eventually Pope John Paul II said it was a mistake to go after Galileo. But I am not sure the conviction for heresy was ever overturned. I mean, you don’t want to rush into things, right? Or rather, having rushed in, you don’t want to rush out just because the building is on fire or anything.

As I say, the Church has often done better on science than in this episode. But if you were in fact part of a cabal of its enemies secretly controlling its conduct, and desirous of discrediting it badly in a way that would last centuries, you’d do just about exactly what they did.

P.S. Conquest’s other two laws are "Everyone is conservative about what he knows best" and "Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing." The extent to which these also apply to the Roman Catholic Church is a matter for another day.

My latest National Post column ridiculed faith in government to solve all our woes despite its dismal record. And now we read that the Trudeau administration is going to make Canadians innovative after more than a century of supposedly disappointing sloth and timidity on the invention front. Does anyone really believe it's an appropriate use of government's monopoly on legitimate force within society to make us creative, flexible, inspired and dynamic in our laboratories, workshops, home offices and cubicles? Does anyone really believe government can do such a thing? If so, why?

Would anyone apply words like innovative to government itself except as biting satire of its endless capacity, as Dave Barry once put it, to find expensive new ways to appear ridiculous? Yet a bunch of serious people with impressive credentials and public sector salaries to match stroke their long grey beards and murmur in soothing tones that at last government will work its exciting magic on that sluggish private sector though it has no idea how, and they are not laughed off the stage.