Was John Maynard Keynes right?  Was John Kenneth Galbraith?  What about Arthur Laffer?  Milton Friedman?             All of these men were esteemed (or at least highly regarded) economists in their day.  And each professed a different approach to economic travails such as the United States is currently experiencing.              Keynes revolutionized economic thinking in […]

            I was five years old, and I was half-watching the game on our new television set with my father and uncle.  (The other half of me was looking at the pictures of the ball players on my collection of baseball cards.)             The year was 1951, the month was October, and my dad and […]

            The scene is a remote outpost in the Korengal Valley near the Pakistan border in Afghanistan.  There, a group of the U.S. soldiers has just met with village elders about a cow the soldiers had killed.  The cow had wandered into a barbed-wire fence surrounding the outpost and was inextricably caught up in the […]

            When I was a kid, every Thursday night during the summer my dad used to take all of us to a farmer’s produce market not far from our summer home on the Jersey shore.  This was an old-style farmer’s market where the local farmers would load their trucks with baskets of their just-harvested fruits […]