In my latest Loonie Politics column I praise Mikhail Gorbachev for the fundamental decency that led him to permit the peaceful dissolution of Soviet Communism. But I insist that he was no statesman, and no thinker, and that credit for ending the Cold War properly belongs with Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and their supporters.
In my latest Epoch Times column I say Ontario’s supposed plan to save our “crumbling” health care system is a bunch of vague arm-waving wishes that the world worked differently than it does that couldn’t be less creative, bold or useful if the people in authority were being dull, timid and pointless on purpose.
In my latest Loonie Politics column I welcome the youth of tomorrow’s future back to the dismal reality of today’s schooling with an assignment to write an essay on what they’d really do if they were in charge, and why it would be so different from what they promised and expected to do.
In my latest National Post column I say we can’t rationally decide whether we want “strong” mayors for our cities until we decide what mayors are for, and what they are.
In my latest Epoch Times column I explain why we talk a lot less about free speech than we used to, and a lot less convincingly.
In my latest Epoch Times column I say it’s predictable that the latest expensive troubles for Ottawa’s megaproject O-Train weren’t predicted.
“You don’t have to be cruel to be tough.”
Franklin D. Roosevelt, quoted as standalone “WORDS OF WISDOM” in Epoch Times email February 4, 2022
“The most common doubt about economists stems from their apparent inability to agree, best captured by George Bernard Shaw’s line that ‘if all economists were laid end to end, they would not reach a conclusion. But economists’ hard-core detractors recognize the superficiality of this complaint. They know that economists regularly see eye-to-eye with one another. A quip from Steven Kelman directly contradicts Shaw: ‘The near-unanimity of the answers economists give to public policy questions, highly controversial among the run of intelligent observers, but which share the characteristic of being able to be analyzed in terms of microeconomic theory, reminds one of the unanimity characterizing bodies such as the politburo of the Soviet Communist Party.’ It is not lack of consensus that incenses knowledgeable critics, but the way economists unite behind unpalatable conclusions, such as doubts about the benefits of regulation.”
Bryan Caplan, “The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies,” Cato Policy Analysis #594 (May 29, 2007)