“Mr. Larry was a past president of the Sarah Scaife Foundation and also a former board of director for Grove City College and Federal Home Loan of Pittsburgh. His hobbies included fishing, target shooting…” -From the published obituary. I owe a great deal to Dick Larry. He was the president of a major foundation, a […]
Read MoreIn the now classic The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups (1965) the author Mancur Olson wrote: “(O)nly a separate and ‘selective’ incentive will stimulate a rational individual in a latent group to act in a group-oriented way”; that is, members of a large group will not act in the […]
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Senators know that even unpaid entry-level work can be valuable. That’s why they make some of their employees work for nothing. President Obama called in his State of the Union for an increase in the minimum wage to $9 an hour by 2015, from $7.25, notwithstanding the evidence that it will increase unemployment among young, […]
Read MoreThis FREE Insight is a warm recommendation of a book by WWII veteran Warren R. Higgins, The Wednesday Pen. His daughter, Ris Higgins, is a Bozeman friend. She lovingly edited this volume and it was just published by Brown books of Dallas, Texas. This is a most unusual book. It’s a collection of letters, one […]
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James Buchanan Editorial of The New York Sun | January 9, 2013 http://www.nysun.com/editorials/james-buchanan/88144 Wikipedia Commons PUBLIC CHOICE: James Buchanan, who died today at the age of 93, gave us the tools to understand the expansion of government that is taking place in our time. The death of James Buchanan takes from us the man who, […]
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This article appeared in New York Post on December 3, 2012. Washington is consumed with wrangling over how to deal with the specter of big automatic tax hikes that will hit Jan. 1 when the Bush tax cuts expire. It’s also the day that the sequester kicks in, which is the budget-wonk term for an automatic process […]
Read MoreAllen Johnson is founder and leader of Christians for the Mountains. This group is devoted to fighting mountain top removal mining in West Virginia and adjacent areas. Christians for the Mountains helps the people and environment that suffer from this destructive but politically powerful abuse. I’ve known and worked with Allen for several years and […]
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A year ago I wrote: “Urban and affluent newcomers to our region bring an utterly different value system for the land. To them, commodity extraction is inferior to the amenity value of land — scenery, recreation, open space, fish and wildlife, wilderness. Rather than the ‘boomers’ decried by [Wallace] Stegner, we now attract landscape architects […]
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Happy birthday, Uncle Milty! Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman turns 90 at the end of the month. Since he¹s done so much for me, I¹m proposing a special birthday present for him: canonization as a saint of the Roman Catholic Church. Here¹s a great opportunity. The Catholic Church is in a huge crisis for its […]
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