Do politicians ever apologize? Should they? And when? What would happen if one said, “I thought my law would do this, but it actually did that, and at great expense to my constituents. I am deeply sorry”? The question occurred to me while listening to my U.S. senator give a stirring speech this week on the need to get Washington off the backs of hometown businesses. “When it comes to regulation, there are examples that…

by Maryann O. Keating, Ph.D. In 1960, garment workers in a four-story walk-up factory in Philadelphia await the return of the shop’s owner-manager from New York. If the fashion industry, headquartered in New York, anticipates a good season, the owner-manager returns with a pattern and stacks of cloth to be assembled by cutters, machine operators, pressers and finishers. First, though, the returning manager sits down at each workstation and demonstrates how to construct a sample…

Now that the Legislature has agreed to let our friends at Ball State University regularly evaluate the effectiveness of the various tax “incentives,” here is a nomination for the next-worst economic-development program. Popular throughout Indiana, it is called a “façade” grant. Tens of thousands of tax dollars are awarded each year to select businesses to dress up their exteriors. We like them not because they work but because they demonstrate what city hall thinks of…

by Cecil Bohanon, Ph.D. Alice’s Restaurant in Hometown, Ind., makes the best pancakes and tenderloins this side of heaven. It also employs 150 workers; some full-time, some part-time. Suppose Alice, for whatever reason, announces she is going to let go an equivalent of two full-time workers. The sacking could take a number of forms: She could let two full-timers go, she could let four part-time workers go, she could reduce four full-timers to part-time .…

by Andrea Neal It’s a date every Hoosier should know: Dec. 11, 1816. On that day, Indiana became the 16th state. We’ve been observing it formally since 1925, when the Indiana General Assembly passed a law requiring the governor to “issue a proclamation annually designating the eleventh day of December as Indiana Day.” Indiana Code 1-1-10-1 encourages public schools and citizens to celebrate “in appropriate and patriotic observance of the anniversary of the admission of…

by Cecil Bohanon, Ph.D. As a former cigarette smoker, I have a nightmare. Somewhere down the road, I get a diagnosis of lung cancer. The doctor tells me the the cancer is treatable, the prospects for a full recovery are better than 60 percent and the costs of the treatments will be around $250,000. Now let’s change the scenario. The doctor tells me the cancer is difficult to treat, but there is hope. A regimen…

by Andrea Neal James Madison, Benjamin Franklin and colleagues spent almost four months debating, writing and editing the document that would become the U.S. Constitution. It took James Brownlee, Benjamin Parke and associates only 18 days to write Indiana’s. The framing of our first constitution represented the final step in a lengthy and sometimes controversial process that advanced Indiana from frontier territory to full-fledged state. Territorial leaders had hoped Indiana would be admitted to the…

REGISTRATION: To ensure an advance copy of the spring journal, click on the “Join Us” button on the menu bar above. WHY POLITICS TURNED NASTY “The narcissism of my generation — the baby boomers — has become a permanent feature of our culture. An ‘it’s all about me’ attitude extends beyond materialistic selfishness. It also fuels intellectual and moral arrogance. The ‘I’m always right, I never lie, and I am a morally superior creature’ posture…

by Andrea Neal It’s little wonder that today’s political discourse is polarized. The folks doing most of the arguing know so little about the past that they cannot justify their views with historical evidence or data. So they appeal to emotion, name calling, stereotypes and hyperbole. A few recent examples: MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry described the word ObamaCare as a racist label “conceived of by a group of wealthy white men who needed a way to…

What if the featured columnist for the Indianapolis Star is wrong that Western Civilization can be explicated through the historical lens of Selma, Alabama, circa 1965? What if there is a difference between behavior and skin pigment? The columnist was so outraged that a group of black ministers would speak out against same-sex marriage that she interrupted her vacation to write a column labeling them “hypocrites.” Here is her reasoning, which in effect carried the…