Drowning in the Common Pool

Here is my recommendation for understanding how the policy world works: read the “Weekend Edition” of the WSJ and skim The Economist.  Curious people will quite naturally latch on to interesting and policy relevant articles.     A few individuals have an intuitive appreciation of systems.  My suggestion will foster their understanding by providing logical […]

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Greater Yellowstone Policy Salon Series

This column is an exploratory essay and I welcome your suggestions.  I’m thinking of creating the Greater Yellowstone Policy Salon Series, an adventure in intellectual and policy entrepreneurship.  Let’s unpack this new idea and I hope influence change for the better.  There is a huge potential for policy reform in nearly every arena of American […]

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 An Economist Who Made the Science Less Dismal

An Economist Who Made the Science Less Dismal

Armen Alchian never won a Nobel Prize in economics. But no less than Friedrich Hayek said he ‘deserved’ one. In 1975, I attended a week-long conference in Connecticut at which the star attraction was Friedrich Hayek. Hayek, who had shared the 1974 Nobel Prize in economics with Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal, was doing a kind […]

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The Simple Economics of Community Exploitation

Milton Friedman is one of my all time favorite economists, Tom Schelling another.  Both won Nobel prizes and each contributed greatly to my understanding of how the world works.  I knew Milton and Rose longer but Tom and Alice much better.  While we live geographically far apart and the Friedman’s are gone, the Schelling’s remain […]

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How Liberals Live

Introduced here by Dr. John Baden A Tale of Two Cities, Boulder and Bozeman First, an admission: I like Boulder, Colorado–as a place to visit and from which to learn. I’ve been there several times and always enjoyed my visits.  Many say Bozeman is like Boulder was 30 plus years ago.  They mean that as […]

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“Is the Feds Game Worth the Candle?”

Introduced by Dr. John A. Baden, PhD Here is one great truth that has stuck with me since I was an undergraduate.  There is little disagreement among micro economists; their basic model is largely uncontested.  This field studies the behavior of individual households and firms in making decisions on the allocation of limited resources.  It examines markets and […]

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The End of Unions

The End of Unions? by Richard A. Epstein (Peter and Kirsten Bedford Senior Fellow and member of the Property Rights, Freedom, and Prosperity Task Force) Defining Ideas: A Hoover Institution Journal What Michigan Governor Rick Snyder gets right and wrong about labor policy. The age of big government is now upon us. The question is how to […]

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Looking Forward to a FREE Summer

I’m writing this on Groundhogs Day, February 2.   Ramona and I are seven miles east of Ashton, Idaho near the Yellowstone Park border.  YNP is an excellent place to explore parables of environmental stewardship so FREE’s work naturally features Yellowstone.  Our July 15-19 conference, “Harmonizing Ecology, Prosperity, and Liberty”, will include a day in Yellowstone […]

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 James Buchanan

James Buchanan

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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