TAPC

NEIL REYNOLDS
Globe and Mail Update
January 7, 2009 at 6:00 AM EST

Vernon Smith, the American economist who won a Nobel Prize in 2002 for his laboratory scrutiny of abstract economic theory, demonstrated that you can’t end market crashes by imposing more government regulations. Born to a poor Kansas farm family on Jan. 1, 1927, he turned 82 last week. His early life was inextricably shaped by the Great Depression – by hardships that provided an enduring incentive to succeed. (As a child, one of his chores was to keep the woodstove in the kitchen supplied with dried corncobs and dried cow chips.) “Like many of my generation,” he says in his unassuming autobiography, posted on Nobelprize.org, “I am a product of strange circumstances of survival and of successes built on tragedy.” Continue Reading »

In recent years, the day after every national election, the Toronto Red Star has published maps of the Ontario results. Ridings in which Conservative candidates won were appropriately coloured blue and ridings where Liberal or NDP candidates won were appropriately coloured variants of red; ie. deep pink or coral respectively.

The October 2008 election map of southern Ontario (south of the Mattawa River/Lake Nipissing/French River watersheds, or, the 97 ridings from Parry Sound-Muskoka, Haliburton-Kawartha Lakes-Brock and Renfrew-Nipissing-Pembroke south) is a great big blue sea with some red islands in it. However, the population distribution resulted in about a 50-50 split in ridings – 48 blues and 49 reds. Continue Reading »