Here's what I find so unsatisfying about arguing with the Ford brothers. It all gets conducted on their ground. They said there was gravy and there isn't. So they lose that one. They said they won't cut services and they will. They lose that one, too. But we're still talking gravy and savings. It's their turf.

What else is there to discuss? Ah, that's when you see the genius of the Ford position. We are a society that has largely lost sight of the fact that there is anything to debate in politics except how to save money. So even when they lose, they win -- by reinforcing the ground rules. Don't credit Rob and Doug for inventing this mindset. It's been drummed into the public ear for decades by think-tanks, pundits and politicians. But the Fords reproduce it ably.

What's in a name? Take socialism.

When I see how opinion leaders all agree the NDP should erase it from party documents, I start thinking they should keep it. Anything that irritates so many sententious people must have a secret ingredient.

The word itself is malleable. It doesn't carry specific historical baggage like communism, Stalinism or fascism. It's more like newspaper, which used to have a lot to do with news and paper. Now it's harder to figure out what's news and it isn't always paper. Newspapers are often out there in the ether, another word that used to mean something else.

Hope is indispensable in public and private life. I don't mean brainless optimism in the face of facts. I mean hope that finds a way to persist in honest awareness of how bad things are.

Take the economy. Everyone knows that the disaster of 2008, which has clearly not gone away, had nothing to do with excess government spending. It had/has to do with other things: loss of good jobs; wage stagnation; jumps in consumer debt to cover the losses; "financialization"; fraud; greed; lack of oversight -- blah blah blah. Any rise in deficits came mainly from bailouts to banks, or needless war-making. The point is: The catastrophe had/has no connection to government social or economic spending. Yet the only solutions proposed everywhere are public spending cuts.

Nothing was supposed to go wrong with capitalism after the global update. Version 2.0 was to correct the faults of the various national types of capitalism.

Capitalism 1.0 focused on households and firms. Across the economy, workers spent what they earned to meet household needs, paying for all the goods they produced in the process. Firms made profits out of investment. In recessions, firms quit investing, and their profits disappeared. Workers lost their jobs, and the economy deteriorated.