Introduction by John Baden: Ramona and I often are out of town on the Tuesday after the first Monday in November, Election Day. Since we are likely to be gone, we are registered to receive “absentee ballots.” How easy they are; mark, sign, stuff into envelopes, put on a stamp, and we’ve done a small portion of […]
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Pete Geddes is the General Director of the American Prairie Reserve. This is an entrepreneurial foundation dedicated to restoring 3,000,000 acres of grassland and its wildlife and ranches. It’s their “American Serengeti”. Pete came to Bozeman from Missoula nearly 17 years ago after earning his graduate degree in forestry from the U of M. One […]
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What does ‘top-down economics’ really mean? “We can’t afford more top-down economics. What we need are policies that will grow and strengthen the middle class.” — Barack Obama “Top-down economics” is a hijacked phrase. Objectively, it should be the label assigned to rule-of-czar capitalism steered by government officials. Instead, campaign rhetoric has been assigning it […]
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John Goodman’s article for FREE this week underscores a crucial flaw in ObamaCare. Not a flaw of legislation, regulation or execution, but a very serious flaw in understanding how medicine works. The fundamental unit of health care is the physician and the patient, making and discussing the diagnosis together and jointly deciding the best diagnostic […]
Read MoreI’m writing this column on the night before the presidential election of 2012. Surely the attention of readers will be on the election tomorrow—and probably for some time thereafter. I’m praying for an early and decisive ending of this grotesque demonstration of avarice, deception, and manipulation of fears. In the weeks prior to the election, […]
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Beginning to Map the DNA of Policy Reform: Dr. Flaherty’s “Beyond DNA: Lessons from the Born” Dr. Bob Flaherty, MD, of Montana State University is the author of this week’s FREE Insights. Bob has lectured at several FREE seminars, and he and his wife Carol (retired from MSU) are long and deeply trusted friends. They […]
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Mitt Romney has accused the Obama administration of trying to “gut welfare reform by dropping the program’s work requirements.” That may be a slight exaggeration, but the administration’s plans do raise serious concerns. As the CEO of one of the nation’s largest workforce-development companies and the president of the think tank that developed the intellectual […]
Read MoreThe Founders were right to posit that a breakdown of the limits of government would cause a breakdown of consent. Only 22 percent of likely voters say the current government has the consent of the governed.
Read MoreBozeman, Montana was the birthplace of The New Resource Economics, aka “Free Market Environmentalism.” Having lived in its midst for decades, I recently began thinking of the historical context of this movement, and the causes of its unlikely success. The take-home message is clear; over the long run ideas have consequences. A victory implies contesting […]
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“It is a paradoxical truth that tax rates are too high today, and tax revenues are too low and the soundest way to raise the revenues in the long run is to cut the tax rates…. [A]n economy constrained by high tax rates will never produce enough revenue to balance the budget, just as […]
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