by Mark Franke “There is no vacant space left in the world today; founding something new requires destroying something old.” — Harvard Professor Harvey C. Mansfield I ran across this quote in Mansfield’s recently released book “The Rise and Fall of Rational Control: The History of Modern Political Philosophy.” Mansfield, sometimes called the last conservative standing at Harvard, lectured on political philosophy for more than 60 years. This book is taken from those lectures.  His point,…

Custer’s Vindication and More WE SORELY MISS the late Norman Van Cott, our curmudgeon and senior adjunct. Van Cott claimed to have wandered into an economics Ph.D. while looking for something more useful to do. Nonetheless, he left us with two sterling insights, one on the Battle of the Little Bighorn and the other on rabid do-goodism. First, the battle. Writing in the Journal of Economic Education, Van Cott noted that a primary source of military intelligence for…

by Dan Eichenberger M.D. The words “common sense” and “nonsense” are used as weapons in politics today. Each side claims to own reality. Conservatives talk about “obvious truths.” The Left often calls those claims ignorance or cruelty. To understand why these words carry force, and why many policies feel detached from the real world, it helps to recover their original meaning and their link to basic Christian wisdom. “Common sense” entered English in the late 1300s.…

Conspiracy or Stupidity, You Choose OUR WOES are not the result of a conspiracy — at least that’s what I keep telling myself. But there is a theory that nags at me. It involves the Cloward-Piven strategy and it works to raise the cost of social-justice programs to the point of societal ruin. More about that later. The news clipping in front of me says that the Indianapolis city council this week overturned a veto by the mayor and…

by Maryann O. Keating, Ph.D. Philosopher and economist, Adam Smith, in The Theory of Moral Sentiment written in 1759, wrote about the dangers to societies characterized by large-scale anger, resentment and a desire for revenge. He outlines a theory of justice and punishment that surprisingly was not primarily grounded in reducing crime.   Smith describes certain characteristics of human nature, assumed to be fixed across time and all cultures. Whenever individuals believe they have been injured, they experience resentment…

Writing for ‘Clicks’ OUR BOOK REVIEWER Mark Franke has written one of his customarily insightful essays, this one on “the end of reading.” I commend it to your attention here.  Franke cites a disturbing statistic: less than 50 percent of adults read a single book in 2022. Although I have no statistics, let me offer a corollary to his proposition. Let’s call it “the end of writing.” I put forward as evidence the work of James Briggs and…

by Mark Franke “The End of Reading Is Here” was the title of an essay link I received in my email from The Atlantic magazine. I would have expected this to be written by a whiny old curmudgeon like me or a librarian worried about her job or even by a retired language arts teacher like my wife. Instead, the author Rose Horowitch is rather young, at least based on her attached picture.  In the essay Horowitch…

America: An Idea or Just a Place? THERE IS A DEBATE swirling around the candidacy of Vivek Ramaswamy, the GOP candidate for governor in neighboring Ohio. It is whether America is an idea or just a place. We can resolve it right here. “America isn’t a place, it’s an idea.” Vivek Ramaswamy, July 1, 2021 First, as Vivek maintains, it is an idea, an incredibly successful idea, one that has proven so throughout the world for…

by Richard McGowan, Ph.D. When I taught business ethics at Butler (1993-2018), Butler was consistently over 60 percent female, once hitting a 65+ percent female population. Inasmuch as any applied ethics course must deal with “real world” data, the data were given to students when we addressed affirmative action policies. That triggered several of my male students to visit my office and offer me stories about how they were treated at Butler.   I made sure they knew that in the…

Our Government Grocery Store WE DON’T UNDERSTAND the concern over New York City’s government grocery stores. It is said they are economically impossible, that is, you cannot price groceries at a 30 percent discount and somehow manage the 1-3 percent profit margins that characterize the industry. But we have our own government grocery store in little Fort Wayne, Indiana, “the Pontiac Street Market.” The city helps oversee the $3.4 million project in a public-private partnership with…