Two Kinds of “Climate Deniers”

Two Kinds of “Climate Deniers” One of the most serious accusations “progressives” make against a person’s intelligence and character is labeling someone a “climate denier”.   A “denier” is a person who rejects the media’s prevailing view on global warming and now, climate change.  The tribe of deniers is insecure.  It’s mainly comprised of “clingers”, those […]

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 Green Cards:  Bavaria to Bozeman

Green Cards: Bavaria to Bozeman

Ramona and I have been here a long time.  The old timers who saw us as newcomers in the 1960s and 70s are dead.  For the others we are part of the landscape.  We have seen huge changes in perceptions of the Bozeman area and the Gallatin Valley.  When we arrived people outside our region seldom […]

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 Cultures of Trust and Civility Foster Wellbeing

Cultures of Trust and Civility Foster Wellbeing

Few professors go to economics from anthropology, as did I. An anthropology background affects how one sees the world. It places far more emphasis on culture. Most decisions are based on information and incentives. Culture creates powerful incentives, ones often far more powerful than money. As Nobel Prize winning economist Doug North explained, culture constrains […]

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Yellowstone’s Geological and Financial Caldera

FREE is preparing for our August 25-29 seminar.  We designed it for Article III federal judges and their clerks. This program will feature a field trip to Yellowstone Park. We will have presentations from the current Park Superintendent, a retired superintendent of Yellowstone, and natural scientists specializing in wildlands ecology. Ramona and I have been […]

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A Primer on Liberty, Prosperity, and Ecology

FREE fosters liberty, prosperity, and ecology by advocating reforms that recognize the importance of each. Our focus is the “romance” ring of the environmental arena; parks, wildlife, water, and wildlands. The focus holds in our academic and agricultural lives. Four decades ago we chose to live on a ranch near Gallatin Gateway. It is the […]

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Alaska, Montana and Heaven

Ramona and I have returned from a memorable two weeks on a small cruise boat on Alaska’s Inside Passage.  She takes a vacation trip to some exotic location nearly every year but I mainly travel on business. I had twice been to Alaska, both times in the winter. One was to the North Slope, the […]

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 Reviving a FREE Tradition

Reviving a FREE Tradition

Ramona and I greatly enjoy our home.  It began as a log structure built from timbers I cut in the early 1970s.  They were milled a mere mile west of our home site.   I like that. We added to our home over the decades.  Fortunately, Bob Utzinger, former dean of MSU’s School of Arts and […]

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 Property Rights and Conservation

Property Rights and Conservation

Minorities suffer abuses when their rights to property and person are violated.  We examined historical situations involving Jews and Mormons in two recent FREE Insights (May 7 and 14). The underlying logic is clear: If people’s property is not given legal protection, then it is cheap and easy to violate their persons and strip their […]

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