The month between Thanksgiving and Christmas is an excellent time to reflect on and give thanks for one’s blessings. We were doing so with friends when conversation turned to the adoption of neglected children. We implicitly agreed that one important measure of a society is the care it provides for needy children. This reminded me […]

From The Bozeman Daily Chronicle Wednesday, November 16, 2011 Is it just me or do people in the “Occupy” movement seem mostly interested in occupying their time? They’d be better off trying to occupy that vast empty space between their ears; but why bother when someone will give you a slogan and armband for free. […]

Last month, Levy Itzhak Rosenbaum, a 60-year-old Israeli who made his home in Brooklyn, pleaded guilty in federal court to illegally brokering kidney sales. Between 2006 and 2009, he arranged transplants for three New Jersey patients with renal failure. The donors, poor Israelis, were flown to the U.S. The surgeries took place at American hospitals […]

In an earlier life I was an economic anthropologist and I still enjoy studying people with unusual views of the ideal society. For example, Ramona and I attended an early Earth First! rendezvous. It made the Sierra Club look moderate indeed. Earth First!’s experiment seems exhausted. Its environmental concerns have been trumped by more immediate […]

What are the proper functions of markets? In considering this basic question, we often are drawn to the basic paradigm of two individuals, each holding an item, who meet in a town square. Each regards the other’s possession as more desirable, and they agree to swap. They find the exchange mutually beneficial, so we can […]