by Leo Morris Have you ever driven a car without wearing your seatbelt? Shame on you. That makes you just one of the scofflaws, those people who think they can do whatever they want to, regardless of the rules everyone else has agreed to abide by. You deserve whatever punishment you get. Have you ever ridden a motorcycle without wearing a helmet? Bravo for you. That makes you a champion of individual rights, who realizes…

by Leo Morris “Socialism” has become such a loose term, open to such a variety of interpretations, that people can end up arguing past each other, some of us attacking something we incorrectly think the other side is defending. Those of us on the attack tend to be thinking of the formal, classical definition in which the state takes over the means of production, which means we focus on the horrible things that happen when…

by Andrew Horning Orwell was right. “Every generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.” So it’s natural that people today (perhaps Mayor Pete Buttigieg) think our nation’s founders were not just slaveholders and sexists, but also idiots. However, before we eliminate the Electoral College, grant illegal aliens the legal right to vote, lower the voting age again, try to…

by T. Norman Van Cott, Ph.D. To many Americans, the mention of Florida conjures up images of orange juice. For others, it’s Disney theme parks, a place to escape harsh winters, or even a place to spend the rest of your life. All represent things Floridians export to other Americans. Popular thinking aside, there is nothing intrinsically beneficial to Floridians about exporting things like orange juice to other Americans. Exported orange juice represents juice not…

by T. Norman Van Cott, Ph.D. Whether one is a . . . churchman or a heathen, it is useful to know the causes and consequences of economic phenomena. — George Stigler (Nobel Prize in Economics, 1982) “Forgive us, Lord, for we eat food harvested by people working for starvation wages.” So spoke the leader of the congregational prayer at my church. Taken literally, it meant that each congregant’s mealtime bounty (including mine) traces to…

by Leo Morris I did not attend my college commencement because, at the time, it did not seem that obvious a demarcation in my life. I’d split my post-secondary time between two schools, with military service in the middle. I still lived with my parents for the first phase at Indiana-Purdue Fort Wayne and commuted from 45 minutes away for the second one at Ball State University, so I never had that “bonding with a…

by Leo Morris It’s amazing how so-called professional journalists can report the bare facts and somehow miss the bigger story right in front of them. Here is the news report from KOB-4 out of Albuquerque, N.M.: Two girls in Roswell had a plan to get a message to their grandparents in Heaven. Shayla and Haylie Chaves wrote a letter, put it in a sealed bag and tied it to a balloon. The letter eventually landed…

“To be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle (the germ as it were) of public affections. It is the first link in the series by which we proceed towards a love to our country, and to mankind.” — Edmund Burke A FAVORITE HOOSIER, Kurt Vonnegut, wrote in a letter to a fan of his book, “Palm Sunday,” an autobiographic collage, that there is…

THE FORT WAYNE JOURNAL GAZETTE treats journalism as a magic show where key facts are hidden from subscribers trying to match reality with what they read at election time. It is to be expected, then, that the newspaper would keep its show on the road after Tuesday’s primary. Its May 9 editorial pulled this rabbit out of the hat: “ . . . but (Tim Smith) will have to alter his approach this fall as…

by Mark Franke I have been looking for something, anything, that I can find as common cause with the progressive neo-socialists, and I think I may have found it. A petition was recently circulated among Google employees to disband a professional advisory board focused on the ethics of artificial intelligence development and application. The board’s egregious sin? One of its members was Kay Cole James, president of the Heritage Foundation. Now the Heritage Foundation is…