by Mark Franke It is August now and for baseball that means the July 31 trading deadline has passed. For major league teams it is the best opportunity to upgrade rosters for those with playoff potential, or to unload high salaries and impending free agents for those with no hope for October baseball. For minor league teams such as the Fort Wayne TinCaps, it is a bittersweet moment. The TinCaps lost their two middle infielders,…

by Tyler Watts, Ph.D. The history of American capitalism is littered with the dashed hopes and shattered dreams of failed entrepreneurs. Seldom does a business failure story make for compelling Hollywood drama, but the 1989 film Tucker: the Man and His Dream does just that. The movie tells a heroic, riveting story of a revolutionary business that ultimately collapsed in failure and scandal. Tucker tells, in a highly dramatized fashion, the true and fascinating story of automobile pioneer Preston…

The Somali Perspective MANA ABDI, a state representative in Maine, says that moving to America from Somalia was a “boot camp” and she abhorred the housing provided her. “They first put me in Kansas of all places,” she says. Other Somali leaders have made similarly disparaging comments, making clear that they prefer what they consider their superior culture over the traditional American one. In my later years I have been trying to put the most…

Richard J. McGowan 773 words A widely used phrase in newspapers and on campuses across America, including the one where I taught, is ‘social justice.’  In fact, my school implemented a committee to design a required, social justice component for students.  Was that smart?  The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy says that “Western philosophers generally regard justice as the most fundamental of all virtues for ordering interpersonal relations and establishing and maintaining a stable political society.” …

by Mark Franke There used to be an economic-outlook panel from the IU School of Business that would travel the state to give advice on the state of Indiana’s economy. I attended enough of those during my professional career that, while the presentations were interesting, they soon got relegated to the dustier recesses of my memory attic. One comment I still can remember came from economist Morton Marcus. I will freely paraphrase him here: “People…

Because We Live Here . . . INDEPENDENTLY, a friend and I like to design thought experiments to test public-policy conception. He, an economist with a construction background, is working on one that challenges the “affordable” housing narrative. I am working on a model for crime-plagued retail. The friend’s idea is that affordable housing is what you can afford, not what someone will give you. He would build a house on the specifications and floor…

by Mark Franke Someone, and I wish I could remember who, said culture was the telling to ourselves stories about ourselves. OK, but what if we have conflicting stories to tell? The assumption behind all this is that the stories are at least partially true, if not in every detail then at least in the morals they purport to teach. What we believe may be more important than what we know. Take the story of…

Islamists, Welcome? “Islamism is a totalitarian ideology that seeks to impose a rigid, theocratic order, incompatible with the pluralistic values of Western civilization.” — Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Somali-born author and activist for women’s rights.  THE DEGRADING EFFECTS are inarguable in a half dozen U.S. cities, not to mention in the great cultural centers of Great Britain and Europe. So why are there frowns when it is suggested that Islamism may be inherently incompatible with Western civilization?  The social scientist Charles Murray…

Urban Life: Shoplifting HOW ARE THINGS GOING? Well, few venture out after dusk on our multi-million-dollar trail system; there are stabbings at Promenade Park, if that tells you anything; shootings threaten to become routine on the streets below our majestic new downtown constructions; and there is shoplifting and theft throughout. At some point we are going to have to face a sad fact, that is, there is bad, downright horrible, behavior by a segment of the population. OK, but which segment? Our Democrat administration would point to…

by Mark Franke During the 50 plus years of my adult lifetime, world population has been an issue but with a change in perspective. In the 1960s the concern was uncontrolled and unsupportable growth especially in the poorer parts of the globe. The doomsayers predicted mass starvation and other unpleasant outcomes unless the rate of growth was not slowed or preferably reversed. Stanford professor Paul Ehrlich’s “The Population Bomb: Population Control or Race to Oblivion?”…