The intro to this week’s FREE Insight is written by James Jay Carafano. Carafano is The Heritage Foundation’s Vice President, Foreign and Defense Policy Studies.  He writes a weekly column on national security affairs for the Washington Examiner and is editor of a book series, The Changing Face of War, which examines how emerging political, social, economic and […]

I came to Bozeman from Bloomington, Indiana in 1970.  My senior colleagues at IU assured me this was a huge mistake.  Their well-intended reason: Montana was a colonial economy, one isolated and insulated from cultural and commercial success. The state supplied commodities, wheat and wood, coal and copper.  From the Civil War to the first […]

Why Civil Rights Metaphors Are Inappropriate for Getting Off Oil Writing on the 50th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” former green-jobs czar Van Jones invoked Dr. King to justify the environmental movement’s singular focus on stopping the Keystone XL pipeline: “There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs […]

FREE’s Insight of March 12 was my account of two young, attractive, and highly successful lawyers married to one another. Each had served as law clerk to Article III federal judges, an excellent career beginning.  I found them and their careers especially interesting; this summer FREE is offering seminars for clerks to federal judge.   As […]

  Private enterprise does more for the national good than it gets credit for. Alexis de Tocqueville reported that “Americans of all ages, all conditions, all minds constantly unite. . . . Everywhere that, at the head of a new undertaking, you see the government in France and a great lord in England, count on […]

One of the great benefits of living here is the remarkable array of talented and interesting people one meets in the Bozeman area.  For example, I’ve met three individuals who have recently worked in Antarctica.  No surprise, such encounters are common here.  Last Friday, Ramona and I were skiing in the Big Sky area and […]

  The prospect of going south for a week in mid February seems a treat for those of us living in Montana.  Hence, I was pleased to accept invitations to speak at NCCU and Duke Universities. It had been -30ºF with much snow, nothing unusual, before we left.  We have seen much colder.  We looked […]

  Uwe Reinhardt argued against the volunteer army at The New York Times economics blog the other day and I think his post is remarkable for reasons that have nothing to do with the military draft. But first things first. Uwe acknowledges that the weight of economic reasoning about conscription is traditionally thought to be […]