“Ambrose Bierce wrote of an inventor who built a moon rocket. When he fired it up, it bored straight down into the earth. A while later he crawled up out of the hole, and triumphantly announced, ‘My invention has proved correct in all its details; the defects are merely basic and fundamental!’ … whereupon the investors rushed forward to press money on him for the next attempt.”
Spider Robinson in Globe & Mail April 27, 1999
“The universal mark of ‘social reforms’ is the general attempt of the wealthy to get the needy well under their control.”
G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News Jan. 25, 1913, quoted in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 # 2 (Nov.-Dec. 2022)
In my latest Loonie Politics column I say ideas like digging a huge tunnel under the 401 to relieve traffic congestion by cramming in more cars, or more government funding for mortgages when houses are unaffordable, obtusely misses the point that if you let in half a million people a year you will overstrain everything from infrastructure to the housing industry to social cohesion.
In my latest Epoch Times column I say that an ideology, aka paradigm or worldview, is essential to coherent thought. So instead of the “I know you are but what am I?” spectacle of people trading cries of “ideologue” we should try to debate the reasons why we disagree about which evidence matters and what it says. And your goal should not be to avoid ideologies but to choose a sensible one.
In my latest National Post column I say the DND report on patriarchy invading the cosmos , while hilarious, reflects an pernicious ideology that destroys all productive enterprises from space exploration to defence procurement, and has wrecked governance in Canada.
“I believe most of the great social reforms of our time will remain in history as Follies.”
G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News June 3, 1919, quoted in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 # 4 (March-April 2023)
“... the whole way of life to which men are attached and the large ideas to which they own allegiance.”
Walt Rostow (in one of his books but my bibliographic note to self is incomprehensible)
“I do not find myself often agreeing with the late Lord Keynes, but he has never said a truer thing than when he wrote, on a subject on which his own experience has singularly qualified him to speak, that ‘the ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas. Not, indeed, immediately, but after a certain interval; for in the field of economic and political philosophy there are not many who are influenced by new ideas after they are twenty-five or thirty years of age, so that the ideas which civil servants and politicians and even agitators apply are not likely to be the newest. But soon or late, it is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good and evil.’”
Friedrich Hayek “‘Free’ Enterprise and Competitive Order” in Individualism and Economic Order