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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Take a look at the graph below. From the end of World War II until 1964 the poverty rate in this country was cut in half. Further, 94% of the change in the poverty rate over this period can be explained by changes in per capita income alone. Economic growth is clearly the most effective […]
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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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This is the second of two essays on the contributions of property rights to peace and prosperity. The first examined the horrific problems of the Jews. Most were caused, permitted, or exacerbated by failures to recognize their property rights. This week I consider the current grazing conflict in Nevada. I am joined by FREE research […]
Read MoreThis is the first of two essays on the contributions of property rights to peace and prosperity. It’s hard to imagine a sane person who doesn’t value peace and prosperity. Yet, these are illusive, oft fleeting qualities; few people understand how well defined and defended property rights contribute to both peace and prosperity. When property […]
Read MoreFrom the fiscal to the familial, conservatives have the right answers. Several years ago, a business meeting took me to the home of an honest-to-God Wall Street billionaire, the first such member of that exotic caste I had ever personally encountered. The home was comfortable and well-appointed, but it was in most ways a domicile […]
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Federal bureaucracy gets in the way of complex ongoing relationships that serve civil society. If you want to see the case for limited government, consider that there’s a siege happening in some dusty corner of Nevada over tortoise welfare. Cliven Bundy, a Nevada rancher currently engaged in a standoff with the federal government over grazing […]
Read MoreThe 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 […]
Read MoreI 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 […]
Read MoreFREE’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 […]
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