In my latest Loonie Politics column I say the government’s inability to produce a COVID vaccine is just one sign of a plague of public sector ineptitude driven by ignorance of economics, utopian expectations and mental softness on our part as well as theirs that is far more dangerous than the coronavirus.
“The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one’s own country as a foreign land.”
G.K. Chesterton in “The Riddle of the Ivy” in Tremendous Trifles, quoted in Gilbert! magazine Vol. 3 No. 4 (Jan/Feb. 2000)
“The view that human beings are by nature good and reasonable creatures who can compose their differences peacefully is incompatible with what we know of human behavior in recorded history. It is starkly utopian.... Order can exist without justice and freedom, as we well know, but justice and freedom cannot exist without order.”
Sidney Hook in American Spectator July 1988
In the Epoch Times I argue that Justin Trudeau’s Canada Agenda 2030 isn’t part of some vast shadowy Great Reset plot, just a set of trendy progressive notions whose sweeping cosmic ambitions will succumb to their own vagueness and his chronic managerial incompetence.
In my latest National Post column, I use Fred Litwin’s new book On the Trail of Delusion about Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories to warn of the danger even of the amazingly common garden variety notion that people who disagree with us about public policy must be hiding their real goals.
“We do not claim that every normal individual always knows his or her own best interests but that no one else is likely to know them better. That is what Aristotle meant when he wrote that the wearer of shoes knows better than the cobbler whether a shoe pinches.”
William C. Mitchell and Randy T. Simmons Beyond Politics: Markets, Welfare, and the Failure of Bureaucracy
“But despite the current, almost mystical belief in communication-as-problem-solving – talk doesn’t always help.”
Lillian Breslow Rubin Worlds of Pain: Life in the Working-Class Family
“I definitely am going to take a course on time management… just as soon as I can work it into my schedule.”
“Louis Boone (1914-65), American critic” quoted in Cy Charney The Salesperson’s Handbook