“While men perform their social duties faithfully, they do all that society or the state can with propriety demand or expect; and remain responsible only to their Maker for their religion, or modes of faith, which they may prefer or profess.”
George Washington in W.B. Allen Compiler and Editor George Washington: A Collection.
“A consultant, we are advised, is a man who knows a hundred ways to make love and doesn’t have a girlfriend.”
Val Sears in Ottawa Sun December 16, 1998
In my latest Mercatornet column I say people are having trouble grasping the dynamics of the American election because they’re reluctant to face the truth that both Trump and Biden were terrible candidates, and Harris might be almost as bad.
In my latest National Post column I warn that because ideas have consequences, and a powerful internal logic, progressive organizations that start with apparently non-controversial causes tend to slide into radical craziness, as with Ottawa’s Capital Pride that’s being boycotted even by Justin Trudeau because it’s so pro-Hamas and can’t stop itself.
In my latest Epoch Times column I remind people of Milton Friedman’s key insight that the real burden of government is what it spends, not the various devices from taxation to borrowing to printing money that it uses to fund, and often conceal this scope of, its activities and ambitions.
“The history of mankind is the history of ideas.”
Ludwig von Mises Planned Chaos [1st sentence of “The Liberation of the Demons”]
“The whole conscious and subconscious trend of modernism is the distrust, and even the detestation, of the ordinary man.”
G.K. Chesterton in New Witness March 9, 1916, quoted in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 # 4 (March-April 2023)
In a talk to the 2024 Economic Education Association of Alberta "Freedom Talk" in Red Deer, AB on July 7 I argue that a radical commitment to truth-telling, including refusing to remain silent in the face of lies, is crucial to personal and to political freedom.