“Bullet” is related to “ballot” (from French boulette, diminutive of boule “ball”). In some places and times, actual bullets were used to cast votes. With the resignation this week of the state Republican Party chairwoman, the talk is all about fixing the Indiana GOP. But maybe it can’t be “fixed.” Political parties are not forever, you know. Sometime the ground shifts too far (the Whigs, the Bull Moose, the Bucktails, etc.)  The institutional features that the Framers built into the…

by Mark Franke I have seen the future, and it works!” wrote the journalist Lincoln Steffens after visiting the Soviet Union in 1919. Except that it didn’t. Why bring this up now, nearly 30 years after the fall of the USSR and its communist- totalitarian system of repression and deprivation? Because a new generation of political rock stars have been anointed by a slavering press, rock stars who gush on about how socialism is what…

Editor’s note: A recent article in the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette (paywall) spins socialism as merely “an adjunct to democratic society.” It is of course more profound than that and the foundation is distributing essays from credentialed Indiana sources detailing its economic and political impact on our lives. For immediate release. by Eric Schansberg, Ph.D. Economists Robert Lawson and Benjamin Powell have written “Socialism Sucks: Two Economists Drink Their Way Through the Unfree World” — a breezy book on…

by Richard McGowan, Ph.D. When I was growing up, baseball was the only professional sport that received considerable national attention. I rooted for the team my father rooted for, the Milwaukee Braves. I asked why and he said, “I rooted for the teams Babe Ruth played for.” As an 8 year-old, I cut out the NY Daily News coverage of the 1957 Braves-Yankees World Series. Subsequently, I laminated them and now show the pictures and coverage to…

by Barry Keating, Ph.D. I want to start in New Carlisle, Indiana, a town of about eighteen hundred people in St. Joseph County, which recently found itself negotiating with the largest company on earth — and doing so, at first, in secret. When Amazon’s $11-billion data center campus came to New Carlisle, members of the Town Council signed nondisclosure agreements. The agreements barred them from disclosing what they called “nonpublic information relating to Amazon.” The…

by Dan Eichenberger M.D. Republicans took a major shellacking in the 2026 elections. When a party loses this badly, people usually look for simple explanations. Some blame the economy. Some blame turnout. But one big reason stands out: many voters were turned off by Donald Trump himself more than by the policies he supported. Trump has always been his own worst enemy. He can be direct, and he challenges people who have been in power a…

by Eric Schansberg, Ph.D. The past — First, let’s talk about the five lousy U.S. presidents in the 21st century. Because the candidates have been so bad (and their political parties haven’t been much better), elections have been (much) more about not choosing X, instead of choosing Y. (Putting it another way: Partisans enable their politicians, while independents largely choose between “the lesser of two evils.”) And so, Bush II beget Obama/Clinton, who beget Trump I.…

A column in the Wall Street Journal this morning gives us a thumbnail history of U.S. Election Day, now Election Tri-Month. The writer is of the opinion that early, extended and absentee voting has ruined it. The columnist, a sentimentalist, seems most worried about losing the majesty of the day, a celebration of “unity in division” is the way he thinks of it. That glosses over a mess of violence, both physical and emotional, on past election days. But never mind, we can follow along…

by Mark Franke In the 1993 movie “Gettysburg,” Confederate generals are gathered around a campfire discussing the justification for their secession from the Union. They submit that the government comes only from the consent of the people and therefore the people have the right to withdraw that consent when government becomes tyrannical.  Sound familiar? The Declaration of Independence used the same language to justify the colonies’ separation from Great Britain. The Virginia act of secession,…

by Maryann O. Keating, Ph.D. Is cryptocurrency becoming a substitute for the U.S. dollar? Curiosity about cryptocurrency is understandable, even for those unlikely to become crypto billionaires. Without a bit of actual cash, we wonder how children ever learn to multiply and divide without the loss of copper pennies, no longer being minted. On a more serious note, we ask, “Are our retirement accounts like crypto, merely digital entries somewhere on a balance sheet without…