In my latest National Post column I say Ottawa’s overdue, overbudget light rail project is a warning to citizens everywhere about how politicians and contractors underestimate costs and overestimate benefits of projects that, once they start, are “too big to fail” so you have to put up and pay up.
“I’m an entrepreneur and a capitalist. I like to spin straw into gold.”
Actor Dan Aykroyd, quoted in Ottawa Citizen October 20, 2000
“’Oh, yeah, when I retire from this job I plan on passing the torch, all right. Flaming end first.’”
A harried, sweating office worker in the cartoon Real Life Adventures in Ottawa Sun August 11, 2004
"The great inlet by which a color for oppression has entered the world is by one man’s pretending to determine concerning the happiness of another, and by claiming to use what means he thinks proper in order to bring him to a sense of it. It is the ordinary and trite sophism of oppression."
Edmund Burke, quoted by Richard John Neuhaus in First Things February 2003 (crediting it to a letter from Nino Langiulli of Lynbrook, New York and calling it "an observation of the ever–quotable Edmund Burke with which I was not familiar").
“Even if it were true that a hundred persons would experience more pleasure from torturing one person than that person would experience pain (in some dreadful utilitarian calculus), such an action would be an abomination. The person is never subordinate to the common good in an instrumental way. Persons are not means but ends, because of the God in Whom they live and Who lives in them.”
Michael Novak, Free Persons and the Common Good