Andrew Keyes

We need government at root to protect us from other governments (and terrorists), and to administer impartial laws. Adam Smith’s other requisite category of minimal government activity was the provision of infrastructure. Governments have fallen down in all three. The Robert Dziekanski affair — and the efforts by our guardians to blacken the name of the victim and conceal evidence — makes one ashamed to be Canadian. Governments have become more concerned with extending the scope of their redistributional activities in the name of social justice, but in reality in pursuit of buying votes. In the process they have engaged in round after round of disruptive policy innovation, resulting in a huge barnacle accretion of bureaucratic inertia. This is not cynicism, it is reality.

Peter Foster, October 20, 2009

Things come down to choices: lower costs versus death panels; torture versus intelligence; equity versus growth. And politicians, ever eager to garner votes, never want to say this. They will always try to have it both ways. Even when politicians choose one road over the other, they take pains to suggest they are simultaneously proceeding down two paths. One can disagree with the choices Reich makes but he is right to say that choices are unavoidable.

Choices are unavoidable, but the alternatives are not fixed over the long term. Constraints are real, but the constraints change. The reason politicians survive is that human creativity often rides to their rescue. New knowledge, new resources and new worlds have turned many a hack into statesmen. But they are the beneficiaries, rather than the creators of productivity; what is irrational is to expect genuine creativity in a world dominated by politicians. The missing pairs of choices in Reich’s list are these: creativity versus certainty, risk versus return, bureaucracy versus innovation. We can live only if we take the risk. That is the most unsayable truth of all.

Richard Fernandez, October 14th, 2009

Hot on the heels of this past weekend’s Saturday Night Live skit, poking fun at the fact Obama has pretty much achieved nothing since he came to office, today we learn that Obama has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize:

WASHINGTON/OSLO — Barack Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday in a stunning decision that honored the first-year U.S. president more for promise than achievement and drew both praise and skepticism around the world.

The bestowal of one of the world’s top accolades on a president less than nine months in office, who has yet to score a major foreign policy success, was greeted with gasps of astonishment from journalists at the announcement in Oslo.

Source.