“They say we offer simple answers to complex problems. Well, perhaps there is a simple answer – not an easy answer – but simple: If you and I have the courage to tell our elected officials that we want our national policy based on what we know in our hearts is morally right.”
Ronald Reagan “A Time for Choosing” (a.k.a. “The Speech”) October 27, 1964
In my latest National Post column I say it’s absurd and ghastly for the major parties each to rail at the other for wanting to tax without spending, as if there were no connection between high program spending and high taxes.
“A man who does not lose his reason over certain things has none to lose.”
Gotthold Lessing (1729-81), quoted as “Thought du jour” in Globe & Mail August 22, 2000
“History is a vaccine against bad ideas. Unfortunately, current problems arise largely from a recycling of bad ideas from the past.”
Valerius Geist, Wildlife Conservation Policy
In my latest Mercatornet article I warn that AI is moving further and faster than we understand, with potentially disastrous consequences even if it gives us the life we think we want.
“The state is not the source of individual rights or of social community. It presupposes that these exist and are worth protecting, and that individuals reciprocally benefit from their interactions with one another…. The state becomes a moral imperative precisely because there is something of value that is worth protecting from the unbridled use of force by those who forsake tradition, family, and friends. A set of forced exchanges from existing rights does not create the original rights so exchanged… A forced exchange does not create culture and sense of community, it protects them by removing the need for compelling or allowing everyone to act as a policeman in his own estate.”
Richard Epstein, Takings: Private Property and the Power of Eminent Domain
“A serious house on serious earth”
Philip Larkin, a non-believer, in his poem “Church Going”, describing what churches used to be and wondering what will happen if nobody goes any more, quoted by fellow non-believer Robert Fulford in National Post Dec. 24, 2005