Vermont has a long history of fostering uncommon individuals. In the 1850’s, Elisha Otis of Halifax invented and dramatically demonstrated the first fail-safe for the elevator, ushering in the age of skyscrapers within a few decades. And who can forget Jake Burton, whose ski-career-ending car accident prompted him to launch Burton Snowboards in Manchester, jump-starting a global industry?

This was the same man who declared at his modest, unembellished inauguration that “Our most dangerous tendency is to expect too much of government.” In Harding’s own voice, you can listen to several of his speeches here: https://tinyurl.com/2hf2u8xu.

I am unaware of an Objectivist food pantry, soup kitchen, orphanage, hospital or blood drive but I would welcome any one of them should one ever spring up. Meantime, I am grateful that people, often of faith, are starting and managing such worthy causes every day.

Pitt spoke truth to power, but in this instance, power did not listen.

The modern German welfare state began not as a utopian vision of altruism and compassion, but as nothing more than a political ploy for one man to keep himself and his allies in office.

Equality before the law is an indisputably good thing. Using force to make people economically equal is an entirely different story. It’s evil.

What the government giveth, it can sooner or later taketh away. That’s a lesson that the Montana ghost town of Granite learned the hard way.

I cannot recall any moment in history when either an army or a cause were mortally endangered by sound money and were saved at the last minute by depreciated, fiat-paper money.

Why is knowing economics and history important? Because without the knowledge these disciplines give us, we can be as stupid and as destructive as a Belarusian despot.

The answer is more freedom, not more politics and coercion. Why is such common sense so infuriatingly uncommon?

The more one allows the world’s wonders to witness to him, the less he’ll want to play God with other people’s lives or with the economy that their trillions of individual decisions create.

Let me take you on a stroll through history, stopping for a few moments to tell you of some men and women born on September 29 aside from me.

Whenever he spoke or wrote, he wasted no words; he said what he meant and meant what he said. His two vetoes of the McNary-Haugen Farm Relief Act were masterful.

If I were running today, I think I would choose the inspirational hit from Les Miserables, “Do You Hear the People Sing?”

Calvin Coolidge’s words are as spot-on today as they were in 1923 when he said, “To live under the American Constitution is the greatest political privilege that was ever accorded to the human race.”

Focus on character-building so that someday you can honestly express the sentiments of the Apostle Paul on the night before his martyrdom: “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith.”

What’s the difference, asks an old joke, between a successful bank robber and one who ends up in prison?

Dora de Ampuero is a champion of individual freedom. Several generations of young people have been enlightened and guided thanks to her.

FDR was less of an ideologue than he was a shallow opportunist capitalizing on the public’s demand for “action.” With the gift of an orator’s tongue, he could sell just about anything to a desperate public. As a candidate in 1932, he sold the antidote to the poison he later injected. Usually, these things are done in reverse order.

Good economics is more than possible. It is imperative, and achieving it begins with the knowledge of what bad economics is all about.