Monday, March 06, 2006

I'm Back

I had a great time at the Liberty Fund.

Had lots of deep discussions about capitalism and socialism and freedom.

Also met lots of great people – all of whom were smarter than me.

Only blogger I met, however, was Sonia Arrison, a Canadian who works for the Pacific Research Institute in San Francisco.

You can check her blog out here. She has an interesting posting on possible plans to tax the Internet.

Also here’s some good news. I should soon be able to cross-post over at the Shotgun blog.

Fortunately, all that intellectual stimulation from the Liberty Fund seminars will give me all sorts of smart things to say.

At least that’s the theory.

4 comments:

rondi adamson said...

Are you sure they were ALL smarter than you? I find that very hard to believe...

Monkey Loves to Fight said...

They are always interesting seminars. My only problem with these think tanks is while the changes they propose may very make sense they are too radical to be done right away. Rather that needs to be a long-term goal and each government needs to make gradual changes so that people won't notice. We didn't become as socialistic as we did overnight, rather Trudeau did each of his changes gradually so while government is a lot bigger today than 40 years ago, the changes happened slow enough there wasn't a massive backlash. Radical changes and done quickly can only work when a very left wing government is elected. Margaret Thatcher and Mike Harris were both replacing socialist governments rather than centrist ones so people were willing to tolerate going a lot further and faster than they would now.

For example with health care, I prefer the Alberta plans over Quebec plans, but I support going for the Quebec plan now instead of the Alberta one. Because the Quebec plan is modest, but moving in the right direction, no one is making a big issue out of it. In another few years when people see the sky hasn't fallen, push the envelope a little further and keep doing that every few years.

Adam Daifallah said...

Miles, you obviously don't quite understand what Liberty Fund is about.

Monkey Loves to Fight said...

Adam Daifallah - I know what Liberty Fund is about. I am simply pointing out that the people behind it are being unrealistic if they think their plans will gain traction. In the United States, they are known for radical changes, whereas Canada is an evolutionary society that prefer small change to big change. I gather the Fraser Institute is one of the big supporters here and the host I believe for the most recent seminar. They have many good ideas, but any politician who ran on such platform would be un-electable. The only way to convince people to support such policies is not to build a Conservative infrastructure, but to start making small conservative changes and doing it slowly.