Should Canada Become the 51st State? | Mark Milke

Transcript

(Created by AI – Expect typos)

Yeah, I hope the peak of this nonsense has passed, but I think in Canada we’re always behind the times, these are the other countries, and I also think there’s an entrenched attitude that, well, you’re just saying this because of your identity or because you have certain ideological views.

No, I’m saying this because I think it accords with reality.

This is Viewpoints, a deeper look into the ideas that shape our politics and culture.

Take free from the orthodoxies of mainstream media and hear diverse perspectives from interesting people across the political spectrum.

I’m Sean Rasmussen, the host of Viewpoints, and my guest today is Mark Milke.

He is the founder and president of the Aristotle Foundation for Public Policy.

He’s the author of six books, over 70 studies, and over 1,000 columns published in the last 25 years.

His policy work has been published by think tanks in Canada and internationally, including the Fraser Institute, the Montreal Economic Institute, the American Enterprise Institute, and the Heritage Foundation.

He’s also the editor of the Aristotle Foundation’s first book, The 1867 Project, Why Canada Should Be Cherished Not Cancelled.

His sixth book, The Victim Cult, is an Amazon bestseller.

Mark, welcome to Viewpoints.

Thanks for having me on, Sean.

You are a big defender of Canada and Canadian values.

Right now, there’s a bit of a kerfuffle with Donald Trump, who has made some jokes to Trudeau about making Canada the 51st state.

I thought we could start with why Canada is worth defending, or if it is worth defending, or should we just become the 51st state?

Well, Donald Trump is an interesting character to put up mildly.

He wants what?

He wants Greenland.

He says he wants Canada.

He wants the Panama Canal back.

He’s also an agent of chaos.

Some people love that.

Some people hate that.

You can probably make the arguments both ways.

Sometimes you need chaos to change up the status quo.

Sometimes you don’t.

Look, it’s hard to read Donald Trump’s mind.

I wouldn’t try.

I don’t know if he knows his own mind.

A lot of Donald Trump is about Donald Trump.

Could be attacked.

It could be just for fun.

He likes to poke people.

He’s good at that.

Yeah.

I think some historical views here are necessary.

Obviously, the Americans, their narratives in 1776 and then since, and especially since the Civil War as well, is life, liberty, their sort of happiness.

They were born in rebellion and freedom against King George III.

That’s the American experiment.

It’s mostly worked well.

It’s not perfect.

No country is.

Canada, of course, was created in part.

It was British North America with a large French-speaking population that had to be incorporated and dealt with and dealt with in the best way in the sense that the British usually didn’t try and exterminate people.

Well, they didn’t.

They weren’t like the Spanish or Portuguese or other empires, or the Soviet Union or Mao or China, which is part of what we get into in the 1867 project, part of what we’ve done at the Ersel Foundation is to ask people to make distinctions which are not made these days.

Canada was not born as a genocidal power.

That’s not true of every nation.

It’s nonsensical in anti-history and anti-reality suggests otherwise.

Anyway, back to Donald Trump.

Canada, British North America plus Quebec was in part, yes, okay.

The Americans are down south after 1776.

We’ve been in the War of 1812.

There’s a lot of concern for the rest of the 19th century about would Canada survive?

It’s one of the reasons Johnny McDonald tried to knit the country together, including with the railway.

It’s one of the reasons we are a country at the 49th parallel with the exceptions of southern Ontario and southern British Columbia, at least Vancouver Island.

We’ve got the country.

Another reason for Canada was, I noted this just recently on my LinkedIn post, was the politicians of the day, at least the ones who were free traders, retired of seeing each province, right?

New Brunswick or lower Canada or upper Canada put tariffs on each other.

They really prevented a free flourishing country, free trade.

So free trade was actually a great impetus for the creation of modern day Canada, the 1867 version anyway, which people often don’t know.

But it was.

It was an economic decision as much as a nationalist decision.

Maybe they have to go together if you want your country obviously to thrive.

To say what to Donald Trump?

Well, look, Donald Trump is not the most informed on history.

Other peoples are his own, quite frankly.

He’s been given a great gift to be president a second time.

He lied about 2020 and tried to steal the election.

And he’s back though, legitimately this time.

And he’s been given a great gift, which is the American Republic.

And the founders of that republic understood in a way many people do not in history, that the great danger to human beings is concentrated power.

Because if you’re, I don’t know, if you’re in a woman in abuse of marriage, the great danger is a man with power over you.

If you’re a minority in a country that doesn’t like minorities and wants to exterminate you, the leaders in that country with the military machine that they have have the power and they can exterminate you.

And this has happened time and again in history, not just Nazi Germany.

It happened in Rwanda with the Hutu versus the Tutsis that happened in Mao’s China.

State power or power is dangerous.

If it’s concentrated and what America has given Donald Trump is a country based on the notion that divided power is a good idea.

The White House versus the Senate versus the House of Representatives, they’re supposed to negotiate.

They’re not supposed to get things done in a hurray by design because the American founders understood the concentrated power is dangerous.

Now in the Berter system, in our system in Canada, accountable government, responsible government is supposed to hold the executive to account.

In other words, the prime minister’s office.

That’s not always happen because when you get into a majority situation, of course, MPs of the governing party want to be in cabinet, that sort of thing.

They don’t want to be kicked out of caucus.

So we’ve seen a concentration of power in the prime minister’s office.

It’s a long way of answering your question, Sean.

But anyway, Donald Trump has been given a tremendous gift, a country at least its founders understood that to be free and to be flourishing, you don’t necessarily want politicians to be efficient or have all the balls in their own court.

Power must be divided.

So no one in the right mind would say, “Sure, we’re just going to give up our country to someone who doesn’t necessarily understand that, which is Donald Trump, which brings us back to Canada or Greenland or…”

He doesn’t want pan on us as well as the Panama Canal.

But certainly if you’re Greenland, yeah, I don’t know, unless you really want to be the 51st state up there.

But my guess is most Canadians, frustrated as they may be with our state of affairs in Canada and there is quite a lot to be concerned about.

I doubt most Canadians want to be a 51st state.

I mean, I could expand on that, but I doubt most people want that.

I doubt it as many of us are.

I mean, I’ve been following the discussion on this quite a bit, just entertaining.

I followed on X.

You know, a lot of my frustrations about the last 10 years in Canada, for example, have made me start to ask questions about what is it about Canada that I value anymore?

What is good about Canada?

When I look at, for example, the way that Canada treated issues like free speech and freedom of association and all those things in Canada versus the protections that they have for free speech in the States, I kind of think, “Wow, I wish I had that.

I also wish I had better weather and access to a large market for my business.”

So there’s a lot of advantages to being an American and I’m trying to think about what’s the advantage to being a Canadian.

Well I’ve had at least two people in the last three days ask this very question, “What is a Canadian?”

Right?

Which has been an internal question and it seems to crop up every once in a while, sometimes in different forms.

The current Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, famously said, I think it was in 2015, just after he entered office, “We’re a post-national state.

We don’t have any unifying this, that or the other thing,” which was nonsensical actually.

You need unifying characteristics.

Justin’s father understood that, Justin Trudeau does them.

Yeah, look, I think there are things we should be happy about being Canada.

No country’s perfect, but I think we should be the North in Switzerland as opposed to what we are for.

I mean, aren’t we at the level of Mississippi income-wise across the country?

Which is crazy.

Yeah.

We should be the North in Switzerland, the Switzerland of North America.

But look, there are things.

I have great concerns about the American situation right now in terms of the cities.

I’m a child of the 1980s in the sense that that was my former years as a teenager.

I remember Ronald Reagan.

Race riots had really dampened down.

In fact, they didn’t really happen, as I recall in the 1980s.

They kind of tapered off from the 1970s, perhaps.

And by the 1980s, there wasn’t that in the United States.

And I certainly don’t remember any school shootings or mass shootings in the United States in the 1980s, maybe not even the 1990s.

We come to accept this as normal.

There’s a famous American senator, passed away now, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who wrote an article called Defining Deviancy Down.

My concern about the United States is I think deviancy has been defined way down time and again.

Can you elaborate on that?

Sure.

Well, Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s point was, for example, he said, “Look, when families break apart, young men don’t have a father, they commit more crime.”

And we’ve normalized, in his case, he was talking in 1960s when he wrote this.

About single-parent families.

And he wasn’t saying single parents are something to be discouraged necessarily or casting dispersions or blame.

He was simply pointing out, for example, the breakdown of the Black community followed the breakdown of the American Black family.

And 40 years later, there’s another author, Charles Murray, said the same thing about white families.

We traced the breakdown of the white family in the United States.

It exactly parallels what happens in Black communities and young men.

They don’t have a father and that matters.

And other things, right?

I mean, people swear all over the place that in a way they wouldn’t have 70 years ago.

That’s a minor example.

Or you accept the normalcy of school shootings.

That’s defining deviancy down, right?

You come to accept that as normal.

No, this is quite unusual in American history to have mass shootings regularly.

So now how you solve that, I don’t know that there’s not a public policy solution.

If your culture breaks down, your family situation breaks down, young males are not kept in line by their fathers.

I don’t know how you reverse it easily.

It’s certainly not a government policy where you can pour money to X, Y, or Z and say, you’ll solve that.

And the reason you’re bringing this up is basically that there are things about America that are undesirable.

Yeah, exactly.

You think you’re having to go through them.

Look, I was thinking about this recently.

You go to a concert, a rock concert.

You have to go through metal detector.

The dumbest thing they had in the 1970s were kids going to an Eagles concert and throwing out fireworks.

Yeah.

But they weren’t doing it as a terrorist attack.

Now you have to worry about terrorist attacks at concerts, right?

So yeah, I think we’ve, this is part of the reason I found the Aristotle Foundation because I think we need to think about these civilizational issues.

Like, have we accepted a low standard when we should be calling people to account?

I think we need a much higher standard.

I’m not saying it’s easy to get there, but I think you have to start by telling the truth.

That’s one of the reasons we founded the Aristotle Foundation is to think reasonably about the problems we’re having, whether you’re American, in our case, we’re focused on Canadian issues, ideas, policies, and the rest of it.

But think seriously.

But the kind of country you want, the kind of civilization you want.

And to get there, I think you need to be honest.

You need reason.

Sometimes you need changes in public policy, perhaps, but maybe it’s an idea culture and a cultural shift that you need more than that.

Yeah.

You’ve been waiting into and writing about culture issues and ideas for 25 years.

Yeah.

Well, I think it’s in part because ideas lead culture.

A lot of people know this.

Ideas lead culture and that leads politics.

A lot of people, and you see this now, right?

If you’re in 2015, if you don’t like Stephen Harper, you put your faith in Justin Trudeau.

If you don’t like Justin Trudeau now, you put your faith in Peter Paulia.

If you’re a Democrat, you put your faith in Kamala Harris, hoping that she wins.

If you’re not a fan of the Democrats, Kamala Harris, if you’re a Maggi Republican, you put your faith in Donald Trump.

I don’t put my faith in any of them, not because I’m cynical.

Again, I don’t think politicians necessarily the ideas parade or can solve problems from the top down.

So I’ve been writing about ideas for some time because it’s more important to say, and if you are talking about government, that they get the policies right, which are based on a correct assessment of what the problem is and how you fix it.

So let me give you a clear example, an old historical example.

If you’re in the 1980s and 1990s and you’ve got Crown corporations in Canada, airlines, transportation companies like Railway companies like Canadian National or other companies around the world that are owned by the state, what do you do?

I suppose you can set up a Crown commission, try and make them operate more effectively, have all sorts of people give you recommendations, or you just simply privatize the bloody things, throw them in the private sector, and they’re no longer a drain on the taxpayer purse because you don’t have to invest capital in them.

That’s a core remedy to an observer problem.

You’re spending money on businesses that you shouldn’t as a taxpayer funded government, you should go spend it on healthcare or not take the money in the first place.

That’s a solution, an actual solution to an observer problem.

Today the problems are different, but nonetheless, that’s the kind of thinking it needs to go on at least if you’re talking about government and public policy.

They start with ideas, right?

They start with the debate of the 20th century, should Marxists run the world and will they make us all fat and happy and prosperous and equal, or should capitalists win the day because markets expand, the economy expand choices, they don’t require the repression of the individual.

No one by the way can trace all the priorities of the individual.

That was the argument against communism.

There’s no way you can possibly.

You want price signals because price signals tell you what people actually really want.

You’re a businessman, Sean, you know that, right?

The idea of Marxism for some reason radical equality where that the state should do everything was very powerful in the 20th century.

We have other powerful ideas today.

Someone to reestablish a caliphate, something protectionism good.

That’s Donald Trump’s problem.

Ideas are powerful.

Yeah.

The slogan for the Aristotle Foundation is championing reason, democracy and civilization.

I guess the thing that stands out to me about that is the fact that how far we’ve slid maybe in the last 20 years, 30 years that you actually have to champion those things.

Those things seem to be the foundations of what our civilization should be, but they’ve encountered a lot of pressure from certain strains in academia and that have bubbled out through all the institutions in Canada.

I just want to get your thoughts about that process.

Yeah.

I think reason is under attack and it is one of the reasons we founded the Aristotle Foundation because I looked around and I thought, again, if you look at the 20th century, the debate was between two competing ideas.

You can call them ideologies, but whatever you want to call them ideologies or ideas, free enterprise, free and open societies are better for people, better for the individual, better for families, better for everyone.

But the Marxist said, “No, equality is what we need to aim at and by the way, if the state you control everything.”

But they were both arguing that they were based in empiricism.

Marxist/communist said, “We will produce the goods.

We’re the ones that can develop the minds and provide employment and raise people out of poverty.”

Free market types, I would have argued, no, empirically we’re the ones and I think that debate should have been settled by now because you look around the world.

It was.

North Korea versus South Korea, East Germany versus West Germany, West Germany and South Korea were the ones that came out on top.

Now Venezuela and Cuba and so forth.

But both sides believed they were arguing from the data from empiricism.

In other words, they believe that reality existed.

They just thought they were the ones interpreting it correctly.

Well, in the 21st century, you’ve got people who basically think everything is about power and as dangerous as concentrated power is, if you think everything is a power struggle and this was the fault of the Marxists, they thought they could impose stuff from the top down and those of us who didn’t agree with that argued they were countering human reality, human behavior.

Not everybody wants to be equal or is equal in terms of their potentials or desires.

So they were ignoring human behavior.

Well, in the 21st century, you have people again ignoring human behavior and that leads to a bad end.

So I don’t doubt that some people want to change the body and want to be the opposite gender.

I’m not sure it’s as many people as is claimed and I’m not sure the average 13-year-old girl really knows if she wants to be a boy or not.

And so it’s a bit dangerous to give a 13-year-old girl hormone blocking drugs and it’s even more dangerous or equally dangerous to suggest we start chopping off body parts of even teenagers.

Again, if you’re an adult and you want to go change your sex, I don’t care and go ahead.

But is it possible that the way anti-reality phase, for example, on that issue where it’s become a bit of a social contagion thing among some teenagers and what do teenagers know with due respect?

We all think we’re bright, number 17 and 13.

Truth is we don’t know much.

So we’re in an anti-reality age and part of this is I don’t want to get too technical or philosophical.

Part of this is, you know, again, that’s fine to get that way on viewpoint.

Yeah.

Yeah, economic marks, I think we’re wrong because they thought a lot could be done from the top down that turned out to be counter to what people actually behaved, whether it’s markets or just families.

We don’t want to share our families.

We don’t want to play tonic ideal where we share everything in common.

That’s always been faulty from people that come up with it, played over communists in the 20th century, being back to the 21st century.

But if you’re a cultural Marxist today, as the saying goes, and you think again, everything’s just a power struggle and it just so happens that, you know, big business or free marketers had control of the governments in the 20th century now.

And therefore they’re just imposing this model and we can impose a different model.

Well, you better hope the model you introduce if you want to replace one actually works better than the model you’re replacing.

So otherwise, all you’re doing is ripping down what has kind of been proven to work over time.

And this is kind of the virtue of kind of the British pragmatic approach, you know, where you develop property rights over time, you expand the vote over time, you know, it’s pre-internet.

These things took a lot of time to work out, but it kind of worked to give people freedom.

It kind of worked to say property rights should be respected because they’re, you know, they’re grounding for freedom of association, for religion, for speech even, and certainly for the economy.

But if you’re radicaling to think any kind of model that comes up in your head can be imposed from the top down, then you end up in a weird situation where you have entire government, you know, part of the, let me give you a clear example now.

I assume global warming is real.

I’m no expert in it.

I assume part of, you know, the change in environment could be human cause.

I’m not an expert.

I just take the Bjorn Law and reposition.

It’s probably happening, but let’s not kill ourselves trying to, you know, kill the oil and gas sector or carbon emissions that’s trying to just come up with other technologies over time.

So I’m trying to be pragmatic about it.

But I say that as an example, that some are anti-reality.

If they think they can simply say, we will be net zero by 2035 or net zero by 2050 or in Canada, we don’t need gasoline powered cars by 2035.

Really?

You sure about that?

I’ve been in minus 40.

I live in it in Calgary sometimes in my January.

Are you really sure that your electric car and electric buses and transport trucks and big machines can live in electricity?

I don’t think so.

That’s another example of anti-reality thinking in the 21st century.

And it’s dangerous because if you get it wrong and your power plant shut down in cold because they’re powered in them, coal used to be much more stable than even natural gas, of course.

We better hope that natural gas plants, where I live in Alberta, don’t have an issue in winter like Texas did a couple of years ago because then we’re all going to freeze to death.

So when people are anti-reality and their idea of, well, this is what the world should look like, be careful of the should.

What about, does it work?

Yeah.

In your travels, because obviously you’ve been writing and talking to people about this for decades now.

And like over the last, say, 10 years, especially in Canada, many institutions have been captured by a kind of utopianism around a lot of things, whether it’s equality, equity, diversity, equity, inclusion, all of those things have been captured by these ideas kind of in a way that they don’t, it’s not like they’ve really investigated the ideas deeply.

They’ve just adopted them, holes, cloth, without really investigating them.

What’s been your experience in the last 10 years talking with people in a variety of industries and sectors about these topics?

Sure.

Let’s go to what you just brought up, diversity, equity, inclusion, right?

DI, there’s nothing wrong with diversity.

There’s a lot right with it, right?

Others that are monochromatic have a problem thriving.

I would assert, if you look at Japan historically, when they closed down between 1600 and what was it about 18 to 1870s when they were blown open by the Colomera Parry, well, they really had to hurry up to kind of modernize.

Otherwise, they were going to be weak and easy to be the rest of the world.

That’s what happens when you cut yourself off and really diversity, diversity of ideas, diversity of people.

The reason you’re a prospered much quicker than Africa is because as Thomas Sowell points out, you had inland rivers, which allowed you to trade, get to know other people, compete, even war produced developments, right?

It was hard to develop in Africa because it was hard to go up the rivers.

So a diversity of people is not a bad thing.

Diversity of ideas, diversity of trade.

What’s unfortunate with the modern sort of diversity movement, diversity, equity, inclusion, is it’s premised on the notion that comes from Ta’anahisi Coates and others and Abraham Kennedy, yeah, Abraham and X.

Kennedy is that mostly much of economic outcomes are due to racism, historic are now even.

Well, that ignores geography.

It ignores education levels.

There’s a reason why East Asian Americans and East Asian Canadians of ancestry are at the top of the income peak because they’re the most educated.

There’s a reason why the average indigenous Canadian average has a lower income than the average non-indigenous Canadian because a greater proportion of indigenous Canadians, so we used to call status Indians, live on reserves.

And there’s not much opportunity in reserves and they’re often in the middle of nowhere.

But if you do app-a-dap a comparisons, indigenous Canadians with a bachelor’s degree, master’s degree, PhD earn almost the exact amount as non-indigenous Canadians.

And in fact, some cases more if you’ve got a master’s or a PhD and you’re indigenous.

Why?

Because you probably live in a city, you’re working full year full time and your earnings are the same or better than non-indigenous Canadians.

But the diversity, equity and inclusion movement has, is also trying to, so they analyze the problem wrong.

Why are the diverse outcomes?

Education, geography, did your parents buy you a library card as a kid?

Did you read as a kid?

Did your parents read to you?

These things matter as Thomas Sowell has famously observed time and again in multiple books over the last couple of decades.

But the other problem with modern diversity, equity and inclusion movement is that it’s also trying to make up for past wrongs.

When I read about this in the victim cult, the new book we’ve released, right, we touched on a little bit in our first book, the 1867 project at the Erisal Foundation.

But if you’re trying to make up for the past for the most part, you can’t, right?

There was horrific, what was actual institutional and systemic racism against East Asian Canadians, for example, between 1850 and 1950, Sam in the United States.

There was horrific discrimination against native Canadians, indigenous Canadians as we call them now.

Up until about 1960, they couldn’t vote, for example.

But you can’t, for the most part, make up for wrongs that were long ago committed.

Thomas Sowell, as quoted in your book, the victim cult says, “Have we reached the ultimate stage of absurdity where some people are held responsible for things that happened before they were born, while other people are not held responsible for what they themselves are doing today?”

Exactly.

Right?

And the second part we should discuss as well.

The first part, though, people are, you know, we blame everything today on the past, try and hold long dead people to account.

That’s unhelpful.

Look, I think there’s a case for restitution and compensation when you’re closer to the event.

So Quakers in the United States compensated their slaves just after they released them in the late 1700s.

They realized great evil had been done.

They realized they needed to compensate these folks that have been slaves.

If you’re in the 1950s, we were right to compensate Japanese Canadians and should have compensated them more for their property.

And the time we put them, we, you know, the state put them in internment camps in World War II, which was abysmally wrong, horrifically wrong, a horrific injury to them and their civil rights and their ability to be free and flourished.

So there is a case for compensation and restitution.

But the longer, you know, you are from that event, and especially if you weren’t the one directly harmed, less of a case can be made for compensation.

So we spent a lot of time today, you know, picking over the entrails of the historic wrongs, and we don’t look at the wrongs today and try and solve those.

I think the problem today on some reserves, for example, is the concentrated power of the chief.

We started this program, this podcast, by talking about the danger of concentrated power.

I don’t care if you’re indigenous.

I don’t care if you’re white or Donald Trump.

I don’t care if you’re of East Asian ancestry.

The core problem in human affairs, if you want to see why the abuses occur, is because someone has power and you’ve got no way to push back against that power.

You know, you could be a principal in a residential school 70 years ago or whatever.

You could be a chief today on a reserve.

And we know the sexual abuse happens on reserves.

We don’t talk about it often enough.

And that’s horrific.

We ought to talk about modern day problems and see what the core problem is.

And again, I would submit, in many cases, where, for example, sexual or physical abuse happens even today, it’s going to be in a place where someone has power and someone else doesn’t, obviously, or other wrongs that occur.

But yeah, we ought to be holding people to account today.

Instead, we let people off.

So in Canada, we have something called the gladu.

I guess it’s the principal, is it?

But the courts now, because of a Supreme Court decision, say, if you’re indigenous, we will take into account your past and sentence you to less.

What does this do?

You know who most indigenous women are beat up by?

Indigenous men, I’m sorry to say.

And I’m not making the philosophical error, the logical error of saying, obviously, all indigenous men are not abusers, most are not.

But if you’re on a reserve and you’re indigenous female, you’re more likely to be abused by an indigenous male.

That’s just simply reality.

And so when we let people off with light sentences, it comes to the second part of the Thomas soul state where we let people off today.

We don’t make people responsible today for their actions.

And so I’m deeply concerned.

In fact, it maddens me that we excuse people that engage in bad behavior today, awful behavior, evil behavior, again, abuse based on the excuses that, well, someone else abused maybe their ancestors 50 years ago, which may be true.

It doesn’t excuse them from their own actions today.

I don’t think it should.

So we’ve got this problem today.

Yeah, we blame a lot in the past.

We don’t make people responsible today.

That leads to very bad ends for people today.

And you know who’s victimized the most?

It’s the weakest.

It’s the most marginalized people today.

So again, if you’re a 13 year old girl on reserve today, or a woman on reserve and the chief has all the power, again, I’m not making a grand generalization that all reserves have this problem.

Again, I think the closer you are to the city, if you’ve enlightened leadership, you’ve divided power on reserves, you can prevent these problems.

But this is why abuse happened in some residential schools historically too.

Why?

Because the school was in the middle of nowhere.

You might have had a principal who was a pedophile and no one could check them.

So it’s a bit depressing, I know.

This is why I wrote the book, The Victim Cult, because we actually need to be concerned about victims today and be careful about attributing too much behavior today to what happened 50 or 100 years ago.

Instead, look people in the audience and say, you have the potential to be free and flourish today.

Are you really sure that by tying your notion of success today to what happened 50 or 100 years ago, are you really sure that’s a good idea?

Because you may be dragged down by the past and you’re not going to have your eyeball in the future.

Yeah.

In a diverse society like the US or Canada where there’s people coming from all over the world too, it’s so complicated because of all the different identities melding together.

It’s hard to see how you could have sort of collective actions that make sense versus protecting the individual.

Yeah, and you can’t.

And so again, and everybody’s got a tragic history and I don’t mean that flippantly.

I literally mean that.

Like if you go back further far enough in your history, my history, those who are listening here, everyone, either themselves or their parents or their grandparents or their ancestors somewhere would have had a tough time.

My grandparents survived the Great Depression on both sides.

They had nothing.

So your family story may be different.

Someone else may be a victim of gross racism.

Someone else’s ancestors were slaves.

Many Jewish people in Canada, their ancestors, their families survived the Holocaust.

They lost many families in the Holocaust.

So there are real tragedies in history and now.

So the question though is, yeah, how can you possibly weigh these on a scale and say, well, this group owes that group?

Again, more recent wrongs while you compensate, you know, if I steal your property, Sean, and you take me to court, then I owe you compensation as should be the case.

But the further back you go, the more really problematic it becomes to try and sort of settle these intergenerational and intercultural conflicts.

And it takes all the focus off what you just mentioned.

Like, listen, we should look at people as individuals.

I’m in favor of back to the DEI stuff.

I’m not in favor of awarding student admissions or grants or jobs based on skin color, ethnicity, family history, whether you’re indigenous or not, black or white, whether your ancestors use Asian, I’m not in favor of any bad.

What I am in favor of is things that we do already, student loans, bursaries.

If you come from a poor background, I don’t care if you’re black or white or indigenous or East Asian ancestry.

If you’re poor, you know, it cost money to go to university.

I took out a student loan.

That was very helpful.

I appreciate other taxpayers who helped me get through it.

There was no way my family could have afforded university.

So that’s how you help people is you look at people as individuals.

If you’re talking about public policy or anything else, right?

But that’s not very fashionable right now, is it?

I mean…

No, I think the majority of the public would agree with the statement I just made in your review on this as well, Sean.

I know, but I don’t…

But I think the people that have kind of the power again, universities and governments, again, they’re so fascinated by this theory that almost everything is due to racism.

That’s why some groups earn less than average in other groups.

Well, there’s a famous quote by Thomas Sowell in one of his books we brought up his name.

But I like to mention this example because it makes it real.

When you think about DEI or what’s called Affirmative Apps in the United States or the Plum Inequity here in Canada that the Brian Mulroney government introduced, it’s again premised on the notion that racism explains so much in economic outcomes.

Well, Thomas Sowell gives a great example in one of his books on why the Italians dominated the fishing fleets historically worldwide.

And they did, right?

Italian immigrants all over the place.

Now, was it because somehow they got control of the fishing fleet and were discriminatory against other groups like, say, the Swiss?

Maybe.

Another explanation is why would the Italians dominate fishing fleets around the world?

Because Italy is surrounded by coastlines.

Switzerland’s not.

And so geography matters.

It wasn’t that the Italians or the fishing issue is biased and prejudiced against the Swiss.

The Swiss don’t know how to fish.

They don’t have any oceans.

So they might do other things like bank.

But so anyway, that’s a good example of where, yeah, we’re surrounded by people today that don’t think, they don’t think to the core of what a problem may be as opposed to what it’s supposed to be in public popular thought and public policy and governments.

I mean, that’s one of the reasons why I started Viewpoints Up.

And I think probably why you started Aristotle Foundation Up.

What’s your experience like as you go about talking to people who aren’t similarly inclined to you about these issues?

Well, sometimes their eyes get big and they’re horrified.

And so that reaction happens.

And then other people are like, oh, the example I just gave where it’s like, oh, I hadn’t thought about it that way.

Yeah, maybe geography matters to economic outcomes.

Or you point out that, again, I don’t have the figures are in front of me, but as I pointed out in the Biccon cult, we also pointed out in the 1867 project, Matthew Lowd did one of our chapter authors in that book.

If you look at the, again, the average education levels of Asian Canadians and others, you’ll see their incomes are much higher.

And that explains a lot.

So sometimes when you point this out to people, like, oh, I never thought of it that way.

And so it takes them a bit to come along and they go, yeah, that’s a reasonable point.

And yes, it is.

And then you can focus on, again, solving actual problems, right?

But there are no perfect remedies.

As my economist friends like to say, and I’m not one, I mean, my background is political philosophy and history and international relations.

Those are what my degrees are in, but I know enough of economists and how they put it is, you know, there’s no perfect remedy, but they’re trade-offs, right?

If you got $50,000, you want to spend it on a new car.

It’s $50,000 you can’t pay down your mortgage with.

You know, you can’t create perfection anyway in any field or for human beings because we all learn things, you know, sometimes for the first time, right?

And one of the reasons actually we do history at the Ersel Foundation is I’d like people to learn from history.

I’ve learned some things from history I like to think, but if you think historically, you understand that there’s not much new in human history.

So protections, as we started about, you know, Donald Trump was talking about protecting American jobs.

Well, you’re going to create American jobs if you start a protectionist war because that was the 1930s.

It wasn’t the stock market crash that created the economies around the world.

It was protectionism that came in the wake of the stock market crash.

The US imposed protectionism then Canada did and in a simple argument against protectionism is a few of a hundred bucks to spend and you have three items.

You can spend 33 and a third dollars each and buy three items and you introduce higher prices through protectionism.

You don’t buy two items for 50 bucks each.

You just eliminated the job of the person who made the third item.

Protectionism is dangerous.

Anyway, so history can teach you these things if you kind of read deeply, honestly, and have a bit of an analytical brain or someone can explain it to you like I just did, you know, to those who haven’t thought about protectionism and they fall for the siren song.

So history is just a lot.

So you studied history in university.

I know that like probably in the time when you were studying in university, that was the kind of changing of the guard from sort of traditional historians to maybe come with some of the newer kind of critical theorist type historians.

Yeah.

Again, I had a minor in history from the University of Alberta.

Yeah.

I did a master’s in political science at the University of Alberta as well.

Looked at human rights in East Asia and their PhD at the University of Calgary and international relations and political philosophy.

But I do remember the University of Alberta.

This is pretty common knowledge.

When I was finishing off my master’s, there was a bit of a civil war there between what I call the classicists and I guess today we call them post-modernists, right, or structuralists or whatever and maybe cultural Marxists.

Again this notion that, well, you know, because you’re an old white male, Plato, Aristotle, so on and so forth, you don’t have anything to teach us, which was kind of the view of some of the new professors that were coming in in the 1990s and the university heard up and some feminists, there was one, I’m not anti-feminist, but some of the feminist professors who saw everything against you, the lens of power, that everything was structural and therefore you just needed to abolish the structure, blah, blah, blah.

Well, there was a bit of a war going on.

Civil war at the University of Alberta at the time of the Political Science Department.

And even historical left-wing professors, and I remember some who, for example, would have been more sympathetic to say economic Marxism than I was because I’m not at all.

These professors were concerned, and this goes back to sort of where we started on the enlightenment and reason, these professors were concerned that the great authors of the past that had survived hundreds of years or millennia and that could teach us something today were being canceled.

Wiped away because of their identity.

It’s like, do you think that maybe something that survived for a couple of centuries, a couple of millennia, might have survived not because somebody up top said, this is what we have to read today, but because they had insights into human nature in 300 BC, aerosols work on friendship or power, or if they give Aesop’s fables for kids, same thing.

These things are still relevant today.

Why?

Because they tell us something about human nature and its enduring durability.

I guess I repeat myself.

It really doesn’t change.

So anyway, there was a civil war at the University of Alberta, and you had the kind of people that took over, and you had discouragement even among the left wingers who believed the classics have something to teach us, and they do.

And over your career of the last 25 years writing about this kind of stuff, have you experienced cancellation or challenges around that?

Well, yes, yes, on occasion.

I mean, I didn’t spend, I’ve spent enough time in universities to know what the dangers are there.

But I never became a full professor.

I mean, I taught a lecture as I was finishing off my doctorate at the University of Calgary.

I enjoyed it, and then moved back into basically public policy after finishing the PhD.

So I wasn’t subject to, I mean, discuss things in the classes that I taught that today maybe you wouldn’t because you’re feared of cancellation, nobody has their phone out in the recording, everything you say, and things can be interpreted the wrong way, or you shouldn’t talk about real issues.

And I hope that that has passed, but I think we’ve got a long way to restore actual freedom of thought and expression, thinking in universities.

That’s sort of my, what I’m seeing out there.

But no, there’s been some cancellation in the sense that, you know, I know, for example, there are bookstores that would not carry the 1867 project in Canada, independent bookstores.

I won’t name them.

Yeah.

They might put the age of chain, which I won’t name, that also didn’t carry the 1867 project.

And I have it, I’m pretty good authority.

It’s probably because they didn’t really like the subject matter.

Looked at a chapter in John and McDonald and went, well, how could you possibly defend them?

And the chapter by Greg Piusatsky, a MAT lawyer from Toronto, actually doesn’t defend or condemn John and McDonald.

What it says is this was his time.

Here’s what he was thinking.

Here’s what he actually did for Aboriginal people of the day and didn’t do.

In other words, a fair historical account.

Well, that chapter caused concern among some booksellers in Canada, and they wouldn’t carry the 1867 project.

And I thought the purpose of bookstores was, unless you’re producing something really egregious and evil and libelous or I don’t know, dangerous to children, you don’t censor books as a bookseller.

I thought a bookseller’s point was to sell books.

And so they found out in the last five years, especially that’s the case.

Yeah.

I mean, that’s a big deal, though.

That affects your bottom line too, right?

Yeah.

Well, this is why we also sell it to Amazon.

I get questions sometimes from people like, “Why can’t I find the book in an independent bookstore?”

Well, we distribute our books in independent bookstores insofar as they carry them.

But some of the publishing industry, it’s an entire other show.

I’m not an expert on it, but my observation is…

It is captured as well, right?

Yeah.

Well, yeah, some of it for sure.

I think there’s kind of a left, left is up or down, but kind of a, yeah, what?

Well, there’s just an invoke as a cliched word as well.

So I’m just just searching for the right word.

For example, progressivism or something.

Yeah.

Well, there’s just antipathy or a concern or…

And I get it.

It comes from a good place.

Nobody wants to hurt others.

But if you’re hurt by words that are written on a page that are trying to make an argument to ban those sorts of books or not sell them, I think defeats the purpose of the printing press.

You want people to argue about ideas, at least I do.

And yeah, you do find around the country that’s not as popular as it used to be.

And so you better be sure, by the way, you’re God that you’re omniscient.

If you’re going to ban a book, again, with unreasonable bounds that it’s not at harm for children or being liable.

How to build a bomb or something like that.

With obvious exceptions, the hubris of banning things other than the obvious exceptions, which you and John Sturtmill on Liberty talked about, the danger in banning things is you’re basically presuming that God exists in your hymn, that you have all knowledge.

None of us do, right?

None of us can be experts in everything and know everything.

So this is why it was heartened to see even Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg retreat on this, that they’re not going to ban stuff on Facebook anymore based on ideas.

Good.

Because with respect, you can’t hire enough people.

What?

Somebody on Facebook or Twitter, a story before Elon Musk, somebody on Facebook is going to be able to properly parse the debate between two scientists about a very complex, I don’t know, a new theory on graph, you know, something, some great modern scientific debate.

Like how anybody on Facebook, hired by Facebook, know how to parse that debate.

Or even about John A.

McDonald.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Again, because you know, there’s debates between historians about how to view them or how we should.

So yeah, I hope the peak of this nonsense has passed, but I think in Canada we’re always behind the times, these are the other countries.

And I also think there’s an entrenched attitude that while you’re just saying this because of your identity or because you’re a certain ideological views, no, I’m saying this because I think it accords with reality.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, I’m sort of feeling like it could be my own echo chambers because I do travel in a lot of circles where people are very liberty oriented, free speech oriented, but I am sensing a, look at when I talk to people out in the street.

They do seem to feel like they’re sort of done with cancel culture a little bit.

I’m hoping that’s true.

And I’m hoping that the, I’m encouraged by Zuckerberg loosening up on censorship as well.

I think that’s going to be a big deal.

And I think it’s also a vindication for a lot of people for the last, especially during the COVID period, who were voicing concerns about the policies that people were doing in government around COVID and getting censored about that.

For perfectly reasonable opinions on Facebook and on Twitter.

And now those two have changed.

Musk bought Twitter and turned it to X and Zuckerberg’s backing off and on the censorship as well.

So it does seem like there’s a bit of a culture shift.

I mean, I don’t know if you optimistic.

I think so.

We’ll see how deep it goes and how long it lasts.

Remember the political correctness was an issue in the 1990s.

Yeah.

It disappeared and then it came back under especially after Black Lives Matter and other things.

And again, Abraham, Kandy and others again, who had been monocausal in their explanation outcomes, economic outcomes.

Yeah.

It should say for the record.

Yeah.

I think obviously there were some grand overreaches during COVID, but you know, one of the reasons I and others found it aerosol as well is to be empirical about issues and use reason on Kritaa earlier.

And I’m a big fan of vaccines and that scares some people.

I’m like, look, I don’t expect perfection of vaccines.

And I’m not into conspiracy theories.

I think the vaccines have been very helpful to humanity.

And of course, nobody gets right a hundred percent of the time.

And of course, there are side effects and pharmaceutical companies know that.

So, but yeah, you know, during the COVID pandemic, I suppose if you question the advocacy of a certain strain of the vaccine or whatever, yeah, you were shut down, right?

And we saw that.

And so there should have been more room for debate for sure.

But in part, because I also think, you know, you, let’s have the doubts out there and then hopefully people with some expertise and informed understanding of an issue can explain, you know, why perhaps the concern is misplaced or where it’s, you know, property placed.

We just published an article by Dr.

Edward Less on why vaccines matter.

And he’s a pediatrician here in Calgary.

And he points out, you’ve got to be careful because, you know, when you don’t have immunity to the population against some of the stuff we thought we’d completely done away with like polio, that you’re going to have problems again, and you don’t want to see resuscitation of polio.

So, you know, we’re, you know, and some people don’t like that.

You know, there are some people who are completely anti-vaccine and I, with respect, I think they’re mistaken.

Yeah, I’m curious about that.

I haven’t been exposed to a lot of people who are anti-vaccine.

I think in my, like when I think about the vaccine thing, it’s not so much anti-vaccine, but anti-COVID vaccine.

You know what I mean?

There’s a kind of a difference there.

Well, people make that.

It’s, again, it may be a conversation with the adolescent.

You want to have one point, doctor at last.

But, you know, yeah, I’ve heard the people who try and make the distinction.

I think the COVID vaccine, you know, was maybe oversold.

And there’s, I don’t remember the, there’s a name, there’s a certain fellow in the United States who has commented on this, who’s, you know, what are you calling, epidemiologist?

Badachari or whatever.

No, no.

But, you know, the problem, I think, one of the problems we learned in the COVID era was that if you overclaim, because you’re trying to move the public to do something, in other words, take the vaccine, well, overclaiming its efficacy or effects in terms of transmission as we turned out, I mean, this is, you know, my simplest understanding.

But my observation is the best way to put it.

I’m not an expert in this, but it seems to me that overclaiming in some cases to get people to take the vaccine is now bounced back.

It’s had the reverse effect with people like, well, you said it was going to prevent transmission or it didn’t.

Now, some of this, as I’ve said to people, look, they were doing stuff in a hurry.

You thought it would work to do X and it didn’t, you know, so I have some forgiveness for scientists in a hurry who make mistakes in terms of the claims, but that’s either problem where you overclaim and then it turns out- That wasn’t so much even the claims of scientists, but rather the lack of actual scientific information dispensed to the public.

Like there was a big gap between what the actual effectiveness of these things was and what they were saying it was by government officials.

Right.

And that’s where you might want to talk to someone who has a better sense of what was released and publicized during that period than others.

And I’m no expert on that.

Sure.

And as an organization that tries to be empirical about this, I would say that it’s quite clear that historically vaccines, which have been around for what a century and a half at least, they do work to prevent things like polio and others.

Sure.

And some of the worst things that people forget that because we get so used to not seeing the effects of these diseases.

So I have some concerns and this is where again the kind of reason or the attention to empiricism and the lessons of the enlightenment come in.

It’s not that people can have questions, but I’m not going to put someone on the same level as someone who has spent their life say developing drugs.

I’m not going to put with respect to journalists, I’m not going to put journalists on the same level as an empiricist working in a lab, understands, pause, and effect on particular drugs, developments fail and don’t.

And there’s a lot that fail obviously.

Pharmaceutical companies spend a lot of money on drugs, developing them in some work and some don’t.

And sometimes you find out side effects after the release because a test of 40,000 people doesn’t tell you who’s going to have a side effect until you hit a million people and one in a million people have a side effect.

So there’s lots that goes on here, but I would encourage people to sort of look for people who can take the criticism, explain why the criticism is valid or not, right from a long perspective.

And then we have these days, as you know, Sean, is there’s so much stuff on the internet that you can find whatever you want, right?

And sometimes we play to our biases and then how do you reason through that?

And I mean, that’s one of the things we’re trying to do at the Erisal Foundation more foundationally than say a particular issue because we don’t have a position every issue.

We try and hire scholars who know something about an issue and have approved and record of knowing something about the issue and have been through peer review on an issue, whether it’s DI or some of the other stuff we’ve discussed or the physiology of bodies in the case of gender transition, hire scholars who try and do the best work on that and know something.

But at the end of the day, well, it sort of teach people how to reason properly.

So it doesn’t matter to me that a pharmaceutical company makes a claim about a drug and then they make money off it.

That’s not a valid reason to dismiss it, right?

It’s like saying what, and remember this is my philosophy days, it’s like saying, the Pope is wrong about something because you’d expect him to say it because he’s Catholic.

Yeah, but if he says two plus two equals four, it doesn’t matter that he’s Catholic, you know, like Catholics, is he right, right?

Yeah.

So I see lots of bad reasoning out there.

Well, I’d expect you to say that Mark is, you know, you’re kind of a classical liberal or small seconserved.

Yes, but am I right that property rights matter to economic outcomes?

Am I right that geography matters to economic outcomes?

Like we talked about in terms of, you know, the Swiss versus the Italians and fishing plates.

Am I right about this?

My analysis, that’s the question that should be asked.

Not who you are as a person and what your skin color is.

Exactly, exactly, right?

So that’s really lousy reasoning, but you see it all.

One of the things, and I think you and I talked off air about this, one of the things we’re dealing with these days, that’s a real problem.

We’re identified in the 1980s by the New York cultural critic who wrote a book about childhood and also TV Neil Postman.

I think you and I were talking about this where I was talking to Steve.

Yeah, off the air.

Well, Neil Postman had a really intriguing theory about the decline of literacy and how we got to be more reasonable compared to much of, you know, human history.

He said, look, the peak, at least in the Anglespree, in the English-speaking world, for literacy was 1850 to 1950.

Why?

Because the ethos was that every child should have an education.

So you created schools, you wanted kids to sit down, learn how to read, to do math, but read left to right, reason their way through.

And in fact, he argued in a book called The Disappearance of Childhood, Neil Postman did, that if you understand history, you will understand that there was no concept of childhood really until the last couple of centuries.

There were big adults, there were big human beings, small human beings.

And what literacy did is created the ability to have children as children because you as adults could keep secrets from them because they had to learn how to read to find out those secrets.

And so Postman’s theory was that when you introduced television in the 1950s, we’re back to the, you know, Plato’s image on the K, you see images and they produce an emotional reaction because that’s what images do.

You don’t reason through image, your brain accepts it.

And the cell phones are even worse.

Yeah.

Well, and so Postman’s thing is reading forces you to be reasonable, potentially.

Anyway, you’re forced to learn how to, you know, somebody makes an assertion, you read through it, you see their logic, you agree or not, they get history right or they don’t.

You at least you’re forced to potentially reason through it.

But images don’t do that.

You see a horrible image or horrified.

Well, we see this today.

The Gaza Strip, there’s some awful stuff happening in the Gaza Strip, some horrific civilian casualties.

I would submit that the core problem there is not the Israeli army and civilian casualties because those always happen to war.

I would submit because I have someone interested in the history of the dispute there and know it that Palestinian leaders have never come to the table and never brought their side of the table and guaranteed their side of the table to do a peace treaty with Israel.

So you can see horrific images, but that doesn’t tell you the story of what’s been happening for 50 years, including the late Yassar Erafat.

That’s an example of where images alone will provoke an emotional reaction.

And so we come now to the age of internet and updating postman’s thesis.

The internet has all sorts of wonderful stuff on it, some that make you think deeply that you read through.

And some of it’s just images that flash into your brain and you have an immediate emotional reaction.

And we use videos at the Aristotle Foundation sometimes of images.

So they’re powerful, but used responsibly.

Hopefully you can lead people to reason by also putting something textual on the screen or making an argument verbally like we’re doing in a podcast.

But the danger is that we’re back into the age of images and it’s anti-enlightenment because people don’t read, they think in three second increments or images and that’s dangerous.

So you have a think tank and I’ve been interested.

I’ve just discovered a lot of think tanks in Canada because I’ve been researching it recently and I discovered yours in that way.

I’m encouraged by the work being done by think tanks because they’re doing a lot of hard work that I think public agencies should be doing, but they’re not doing right now.

So it’s sort of being offloaded to these think tanks.

But what’s your opinion about the role of think tanks in society and how they fit in with the democratic process and all that?

Well, I think they filled the gap.

So I’m not sure the public agencies or governments actually should do all policy thinking.

A lot of times they don’t because they become captured by, because the kind of underlying assumption there is that if you get enough smart people and enough tax dollars in the same room, they can solve any problem from the top down and I think that’s faulty.

So think tanks historically arose in the 19th century starting with slavery.

Arthur and Louis Tappen, two philanthropists began to fund think tanks that began to fund newspapers and abolitionist movements and advocacy movements to combat slavery.

That’s where think tanks actually started.

In the 20th century, think tanks, at least the free enterprise ones, arose in response to the threat of state control of Marxism is on the marks, socialism, its sister variety was also in the march where they would nationalize energy companies, mining companies, forestry, in the extreme in Marxist countries, the entire economy was nationalized.

So you saw think tanks arise in the United States and Canada and elsewhere to say, “Hold on.

What if you guys have it wrong as a government?”

So think tanks basically are great vehicles for thinking about ideas and policies.

And as we mentioned a moment ago, because it leads culture and certainly needs politics.

So that’s kind of what think tanks do in their best form.

Now some think tanks I think are dishonest.

They have an agenda that I think is anti-reality on the economy, other issues.

So not everything tank is created alike, but I think on the free market side, for example, they were right historically now, but open economies help people flourish better than closed economies, whether they’re protectionists or in the 20th century, since Marxist.

You see that in South Korea.

It’s amazing that South Korea is exporting culture now in addition to economic goods.

It wouldn’t have happened if the North Koreans had won in the 1950s.

I know you see the pictures of the Korea at night from a satellite and like one half is like bright and other half is completely…

Exactly.

So it’s a VR idea vehicles and universities can be that too.

But again, where universities produce ideas?

I mean, there’s some great stuff obviously that’s come out of universities over the hundreds of years or a thousand years.

In some cases these days, there’s a lot of pull that comes out.

Yeah.

Because if you’re a tenured professor, you can burrow down into something that’s completely irrelevant and possibly anti-reality, which is where I think some of the bad things have come from in the last several decades.

I mean, you’re old enough, Sean, as am I to remember Alan Bloom and the closing of the American mind.

Yeah.

I had a professor at the University of Alberta, long since retired beyond Craig, who once said 80% of the stuff produced at universities in terms of the output is nonsense.

He was a very bright individual and very critical.

I think, for example, we can sort of end on this, but I’d like to see a reform of the universities.

Why premise the advancement of a professor on publications, on research?

You’ve got some great teachers out there.

Why should they research?

Maybe they just enjoy finding out what the best work is on a subject and they’re really great at communicating it.

Why force those who are excellent lecturers and teachers to also research and produce stuff?

Because that’s where you get gunk.

Yeah.

Right?

It’s not their thing.

Yeah, exactly.

On the other hand, well, they might be great teachers.

So let them just teach.

Don’t ask them to publish books and make their salary or their promotion or whatever, tenorship, contingent on that.

On the other hand, you may have people who don’t want to teach at all.

They’re great researchers.

They just want to be the proverbial and offense nerd behind the computer or in a lab.

The last thing they want to do is interact with students.

That’s fine.

Let them do the research in the lab or elsewhere.

I think there’s great potential for universities to reform themselves along those lines and other lines.

In addition, everything else you’ve talked about, stop pretending racism explains all.

Stop pretending Canada is a colonialist racist state when it has, well, the racism was there in the past, but it was never genocidal.

So stop of the nonsensical, anti-reality, out-of-touch theories.

Universities used to get mocked for being an ivory tower.

They can be that.

But there are some segments of the professorship in universities and elsewhere that is anti-reality precisely because they’re so protected from reality.

They don’t have to deal with it.

A business person has to make a profit.

A charity has to raise money.

The government, political parties need votes.

That’s what keeps them somewhat in touch with reality.

So think tanks are just, they’ve risen, I think, in response to certain needs in the past two centuries.

The think tank, it depends on what the felt need is, as to why the think tank arose.

I’m curious too as to how think tanks make money and keep going and pay for the research that they’re doing.

Oh, it depends on the think tank, right?

Some are got shonded at the Aristotle Foundation, other ones I’ve been associated with in the past.

We’re not precisely because we don’t want to shave our message or shave our research or taterally research to say what government wants to fund today because, again, sometimes are captive of ideas that we think are bad these days.

So I just don’t want, government has enough power.

I don’t want to give them power over what we do at the Aristotle Foundation.

And generally you find that more free market think tanks or what we are, I’d describe as more of a gain of reality based think tank and a number of issues.

We just, you don’t want to be tied to government.

So we’re a charity, we’re an educational charity because we’re trying to educate the public on a number of issues.

The book, the 1867 project was basically a history project.

But we take donations from foundations and individuals and businesses and they get charitable tax receipts.

And that’s how a lot of think tanks, which they’re all nonprofits like ours, operate.

Some take government funding, but we’ve chosen not to.

Okay.

Well, you guys do great work.

I’ve read the good portion of the 1867 project and I loved it.

Actually that, the essay by, I think his name’s Robson.

John Robson.

John Robson.

I actually kind of had to tear my eye after reading that essay, just the history of liberty, the tradition of liberty in the British.

Yeah, back to the Magna Carta.

Yeah, that was, it was a really moving look at the history.

I will have to pass that on to John.

And also too, the victim cult was fantastic as well, your book.

And so if people want to find out more about you and the Aristotle Foundation and your books, where can they go?

AristotleFoundation.org.

That’s your best shot, erisallathoundation.org or .ca.

We’ve got all the domain names there.

So.

Okay.

And I’ll put links to your books and to the Aristotle Foundation in the show notes as well.

And I want to thank you so much, Mark.

You’re welcome.

Thank you, Sean.

Thanks for having me, Sean.

It was, it was great, great conversation.

That’s it for this episode of Viewpoints.

Thanks for listening.

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You can connect using the contact form in the website or you can send me an email directly at www.Sean@ViewpointsPodcast.ca. . . . .

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