Hrag Vartanian

From one of my favorite Armenian Canadian writers (& he’s also a curmudgeon), Ara Baliozian:

In the USSR the economy was controlled; in the U.S. it was free. Both went bust. This may suggest a number of things, among them:

1. all systems are open to abuse and corruption, and no system is foolproof;
2. sooner or later all dogmas are exposed as fallacies by the reality principle;
3. more often than not crises are created by experts or self-assessed superior intellects;
4. the stronger an opinion, the weaker its foundation in truth;
5. to know all there is to know about a specific academic discipline does not mean to know more about life;
6. next time you run into someone who knows better, consider the possibility that his superior knowledge may be inferior to your ignorance;
7. a political party will have a better chance to survive if its party line is a zigzag; and
8. when it comes to their own expertise, all experts are optimists.