by Cecil Bohanon, Ph.D. Recently, a scholar from Liberty Fund, an Indianapolis-based educational foundation, visited Ball State University and gave a lecture entitled “Karl Marx 101” to the student-led Economics Club. Twenty or so students attended. About half of them had read the assigned excerpts from Marx and Engels’ “Communist Manifesto.” Dr. Peter Mentzel provided some biographical details about Karl Marx and outlined three major themes of Marx’s analysis. First, like Adam Smith and David…

by Andrea Neal For a trip back to the “good ol’ days,” nothing beats a burger at The Suds in Greenwood where cruising, carhops and curb service are still the main ingredients of a Saturday night on the town. A uniquely American institution that developed along with the car culture, the drive-in restaurant was introduced in the 1920s, enjoyed its heyday in the 1950s and conceded victory in the 1970s to the more efficient drive-through…

George Gilder. The Scandal of Money: Why Wall Street Recovers but the Economy Never Does (Regnery Publishing) by Maryann O. Keating, Ph.D. If negative interest rates do not make any sense to you, this book will be of interest. George Gilder, techno-utopian advocate, reminds us of times when money and interest rates stood for something other than tools to be manipulated by officials of the Federal Reserve System (the FED) in a futile attempt to…

by Andrea Neal A wave of high-tech creativity in the late 19th and early 20th centuries cemented Fort Wayne’s reputation as the Silicon Valley of its day. Some innovation highlights: Jenney Arc Lights illuminated League Park in Fort Wayne in 1883 for one of the earliest baseball games played at night. A self-measuring pump mechanism, devised in 1885 by Sylvanus Bowser, paved the way for today’s do-it-yourself gas pumps. The 1921 Horton electric washing machine freed…

  (For the use of the membership only; not for publication, duplication or quotation.) AT THIS WEEK’S council meeting in my city, during open comments at the end of the session right before they take out the flag, a question was asked: Did the administration have any information to share on the Mideast immigrants whom the mayor had invited to resettle here? The sound you heard was a pin dropping. For to merely ask the question…

Members: The author is a former legislator and councilman now an instructor at the Keith Busse School of Business and Entrepreneurship at the University of Saint Francis in Fort Wayne. This is adapted from testimony he presented this week to the Fort Wayne City Council, the first in the state to take up the new option of exempting business personal property taxes. The measure, written and introduced by Councilman Jason Arp, was defeating 5-3. by Mitch…

IT WAS ONE OF THOSE government-can-work-magic stories — a parks department repurposes an old municipal dump into a new golf course. Shazam! Happy citizens playing cheap golf, manicured greens and fairways instead of smelly sludge and trash. The problem, government being government, is that a new municipal golf course is run, well, like an old municipal dump. Unaccountability and the resulting oversights and miscalculations end up costing somebody — taxpayers — a lot of money.…

by Andrea Neal Chief Justice Earl Warren gets most of the credit, and rightly so, for the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education outlawing segregated schools. But were it not for a Hoosier — Justice Sherman Minton of Floyd County — the Brown case would not have even been before the Supreme Court at that time. In 1952, prior to Warren’s appointment, the court had to decide whether or not…

“In an all-Navy message published Tuesday, Chief of Naval Personnel Vice Adm. Robert Burke said a three-pronged training approach will equip senior leaders and rank-and-file personnel for the changes (to open transgender service).” — military.com, Sept. 16, 2016 HAVING BREAKFAST one Sunday off U.S. 931 in Kokomo, reading about NFL players protesting Western Civilization, I was witness to one of those micro-events that runs counter to the popular narrative. It was a group of veterans on…

by Martina Webster We should educate people on the tax-rate formula every chance we get. The more who understand the concept, the better the dialog on government spending. For starters, could giving up a tax exemption lower your taxes? Consider that it is time for the Legislature to designate something other than the Homestead Credit as the marker for the benefit a property owner gets with the 1-percent property tax cap. Let me explain: Tax…