Category: Rogge, Ben

Nock Taught Buckley that Members of the “Remnant” Can Save the World

I was taught about the remnant by Ben Rogge, my mentor at Wabash College. When I find hope ebbing, I remind myself of Nock’s story, as briefly distilled by Rogge.

(p. A13) It isn’t a backhanded compliment to say that the funniest show on television this week—or any in recent memory—is “The Incomparable Mr. Buckley.” The “American Masters” production does its ostensible duty, exploring the origins, education and machinations of William F. Buckley Jr. as an architect of American conservatism. But his wit is so sharp, his ripostes so surgical, and his extemporaneous bons mots so witheringly droll that the humor, as well as anything else, explains not just his long and lasting popularity but his ability to charm the opposition.

. . .

The Buckley family story is a tale well told in this almost two-hour production, . . .

. . .

The Buckley money came from William Sr.’s oil explorations in Mexico and he established the family dynasty at Great Elm, the Connecticut estate where William Jr. and his nine siblings were not only raised but educated. It was an idyllic upbringing, influenced by the thinking of ur-libertarian Albert Jay Nock, who was a frequent guest at Great Elm and believed that “The Remnant,” a small minority of enlightened and educable individuals, would be the inheritors and saviors of society. That Buckley perceived himself as being part of that remnant was never a question. Call it perverse, but it was part of his charm.

For the full review see:

John Anderson. “TELEVISION REVIEW; William F. Buckley’s Wit and Wisdom.” The Wall Street Journal (Wednesday, April 3, 2024): A13.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date April 2, 2024, and has the title “TELEVISION REVIEW; ‘The Incomparable Mr. Buckley’ Review: Withering Wit and Wisdom.”)

Nock’s essay on the Remnant, mentioned above, has been reposted on the web:

Nock, Albert Jay. “Isaiah’s Job.” Atlantic Monthly 157, no. 6 (June 1936): 641-49.

Milton Friedman’s “Unflinching Defense” of Libertarianism

(p. A3) . . . [Milton] Friedman was highly influential. In academia, he did pioneering work on consumer behavior, monetary history and the unstable relation between inflation and unemployment. Outside the ivory tower, he is remembered for his unflinching defense of classical liberalism—a position that today is often called libertarianism. “Capitalism and Freedom” is the best entry into Friedman’s lucid mind. You will enjoy reading it even if you disagree with most of his judgments. A socialist student at Harvard once told me it was one of his favorite books. “Why?” I asked. “Because it clearly explains the point of view I have to argue against.”

For the full review, see:

N. Gregory Mankiw. “Five Best: Economics Primers.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, Aug. 18, 2023): A3.

(Note: ellipsis, and bracketed name, added.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date June 2, 2023, and has the title “Five Best: Economics Primers.”)

Friedman’s best popular book, developed from lectures first presented at Wabash College that were co-organized by my mentor Ben Rogge, is:

Friedman, Milton. Capitalism and Freedom. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1962.

Will Humans Flourish if Easements Restrict How Inherited Property Is Used?

My mentor at Wabash College, Ben Rogge, was a friend of Pierre Goodrich, the founder of Liberty Fund. They both were great admirers of Adam Smith. Adam Smith believed that inherited property should not be encumbered with restrictions on how future generations used the property. The practice is sometimes called ‘ruling with a dead hand.’ When Liberty Fund was proposed, Rogge suggested that it be set up so that all of the funds would be exhausted at some pre-established time after Goodrich’s death. On this one proposal, Rogge failed to convince Goodrich of the wisdom of Adam Smith’s advice.

Rogge was a supporter of Schumpeter’s idea that we flourish through creative destruction. Progress through creative destruction is harder to accomplish if inherited property is encumbered by ‘ruling with a dead hand.’ Rogge feared that as the decades passed, the inheritors of Liberty Fund would eventually, and substantially, diverge from Goodrich’s original values and hopes. Liberty Fund money helped Rogge make a movie on Adam Smith. Rogge sadly joked that eventually the inheritors of Liberty Fund would probably support making a movie on a famous socialist.

(I can’t remember the name of the socialist who Rogge jokingly mentioned, but I vaguely, vaguely think it might have been Ethel Rosenberg.)

(I base the lines above on my memories of comments by Ben Rogge in conversations and lectures.)

(p. M1) “After me, there won’t be any others,” says Roland Reisley, absorbing what it means to be the last original occupant of a Frank Lloyd Wright house. Reisley is sitting in his hexagonal living room on a rocky hill near Pleasantville, N.Y.

. . .

(p. M4) Despite the house’s pristine condition, the one thing he can’t do is turn it into a museum. It is part of a Westchester County neighborhood laid out by Wright himself in the late 1940s. The community, which Wright named Usonia, never achieved its founders’ ambitions—to become a kind of exurban co-op where everything was owned in common—but it is still a tightly knit community of 47 homes with shared amenities such as a pool and tennis courts. “The residents would not agree to a museum,” Reisley says.

. . .

But if he can’t turn it into a museum, he can execute a preservation easement, a legal document that will prevent future owners from making changes to the house.

. . .

Asked why he hasn’t executed an easement yet, after talking about doing so for years, Reisley says he is “trying to find language that protects what’s important but allows for some reasonable changes to be made. I am going to do it,” Reisley says. “I just haven’t gotten around to doing it. I’m a procrastinator.”

Then, too, his only living child has expressed concerns. Robert Reisley, a 65-year-old entrepreneur and private-equity investor in Philadelphia, says, “I don’t have an issue with a preservation easement on the exterior of the house.” But he says it’s possible he and his wife, or one of their adult children, might want to live in the house. “We might need to make a few necessary changes to the interior. And we might not be able to get permission. That’s my hesitation.”

For example, he says, “The hallway to the bedrooms is very dark. Wright was practical. If we’d asked him, he would have said, ‘Put a skylight there.’ But Wright’s not around, and the conservancy might not allow it.”

. . .

In Minneapolis, the Olfelt house was on the market for two years before a local couple with grown children bought it for $1.2 million in the Spring of 2018. Several months later, they filed plans with the city to add a 1,500-square-foot, $2 million wing to the original 2,600-square-foot house and alter some of the original interiors.

. . .

The Juneks created a website, olfelthouse.info, to explain their intentions. “The impetus for the addition and the minimal interior renovations,” they wrote, “is to address the meager space allocated to the master bedroom, to expand the kitchen to accommodate a large multi-generation family, and to ensure that the home be comfortable, accessible, and safe for aging in place.” The renovation was designed by the New York architecture firm Thread Collective. Photos on the firm’s website show a dining room in a space that used to contain Wright’s tiny galley kitchen, and a spacious new kitchen in what used to be two children’s bedrooms. The addition, which contains a master-bedroom suite over a new garage, is visible mainly from the back of the house. “We have now been living in the house for three years, are very happy with the results of the project,” John Junek wrote in an email.

. . .

Robert and Mary Walton chose not to burden their six children with a preservation easement, the same choice made by Gerte Shavin, Bette Pappas, and the Olfelts. All of them died knowing they had no control over the future of their houses. “Its fate is entirely in the hands of the next owner,” Paul Olfelt told me in a phone message after vacating his house in 2017. Sounding emotional, he added, “I think we were good stewards of the house, and we assume that anyone who buys it will be the same.”

Reisley still has a chance to execute an easement. Will he? The easement would operate in perpetuity, and perpetuity, the 99-year-old homeowner says, “is a very long time.”

For the full story, see:

Fred A. Bernstein. “The Last Original Owner of a Frank Lloyd Wright House.” The Wall Street Journal (Wednesday, June 30, 2023): M1 & M4.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story was updated June 27, 2023, and has the title “Frank Lloyd Wright Built 120 Homes Near the End of His Life. Just One Original Owner Remains.”)

Rogge and Friedman on Bread and Freedom

At the start and end of the movie above, you can hear the voice and thoughts of my Wabash College mentor Ben Rogge. His interview of Milton Friedman at the end is especially wonderful if you are a libertarian fan of Rogge and Friedman. I believe Rogge had an important hand in the production of this movie, as he did in a couple of movies from Liberty Fund. I think he also advised Milton Friedman on his famous “Free to Choose” television series. Rogge was a libertarian intellectual entrepreneur, who encouraged and enabled many now-more-famous libertarians to think, write, and speak. Whether he is remembered or forgotten, Rogge made a difference.

The movie is based on the book of the same title:

Brown, Susan Love, Karl Keating, David Mellinger, Patrea Post, Stuart Smith, and Catriona Tudor. The Incredible Bread Machine. San Diego: World Research, Inc., 1975.

(Note: the book is based on a poem by R.W. Grant that had the title “Tom Smith and His Incredible Bread Machine.” I believe, but have not confirmed my memory, that a version of Grant’s poem appears in the book by Love et al.)

“We Grow at Night, While the Government Sleeps”

HarareNightStreetMarket2017-09-10.jpg“In Harare, unauthorized street vendors wait until dark to avoid the police. The government says 95 percent of the work force is involved in the informal economy.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

I remember my Wabash College economics professor, Ben Rogge, telling us that during one of his visits to Brazil, many decades ago, he asked an entrepreneur how the Brazilian economy managed to grow in spite of the heavy government regulations. With a smile, the entrepreneur told Ben: “We grow at night, while the government sleeps.”

(p. 6) HARARE, Zimbabwe — Dusk falls and thousands of vendors fan out across central Harare. Through the night, they hawk their wares — vegetables, clothes, kitchen utensils, cellphones — from carts, wheelbarrows or even the pavement, transforming the city’s staid business district into a giant, freewheeling village market.

On Robert Mugabe Road, around the corner from the city’s remaining colonial-era luxury hotel, the Meikles, Victor Chitiyo has sold dress shirts since losing his job as a machine operator at a textile factory several years ago.
“Since then, I’ve never been employed,” Mr. Chitiyo, 38, said under the dim light of a street lamp. “If the economy improves, I’d want to be employed at a company again. But I don’t think that will happen. It’s been a long time since we were optimistic in Zimbabwe.”
Harare’s night market is the most visible evidence of Zimbabwe’s swelling informal economy, which the government estimates now employs all but a small share of the country’s work force.
Even as Zimbabwe’s government, banks, listed companies and other members of the formal economy lurch from one crisis to another, the thriving informal economy of street vendors, traders and others unrepresented in official statistics helps keep the country afloat. For the government of President Robert Mugabe, that parallel economy is both a source of stability — and a potential challenge.
Once one of Africa’s most advanced economies, Zimbabwe has rapidly deindustrialized and shed formal wage-paying jobs, forcing millions like Mr. Chitiyo to hustle on the streets in cities and towns.
From 2011 to 2014, the percentage of Zimbabweans scrambling to make a living in the informal economy shot up to an astonishing 95 percent of the work force from 84 percent, according to the government. And of that small number of salaried workers, about half are employed by the government, including patronage beneficiaries with few real duties.
. . .
The government has occasionally cracked down — sometimes violently — on the street vendors, who are not licensed, describing their activities, near the seat of government and businesses, as an eyesore. Some of the vendors have also staged protests against Mr. Mugabe’s rule.
But the government mostly turns a blind eye, clearly calculating that a permanent crackdown on the livelihoods of an increasing number of its citizens would result in greater political instability. According to an unspoken rule, the street vendors are allowed to operate only after dark on weekdays and starting in late afternoon on weekends.
“If I come too early, the police will take my wares away and I’ll be broke,” said Norest Muza, 28, who sold popcorn and chips while carrying her 2-year-old son on her back. “Evenings, the police don’t come.”
Many of the street vendors arrive in Harare’s business district at dusk and spend the night on the streets before going home at dawn with the morning’s first taxis and buses.
. . .
Mr. Mugabe’s violent seizure of white-owned farms starting in 2000 precipitated a decline in manufacturing and a process of deindustrialization. Manufacturing peaked in 1992, accounting for about 30 percent of the gross domestic product. Now it is 11 percent and declining.
. . .
With the government now strictly controlling the transfer of dollars outside Zimbabwe, companies dependent on trade are finding it increasingly difficult to import critical goods.
“We have companies scaling down or discontinuing certain lines that are heavy on import requirements,” said Busisa Moyo, president of the Confederation of Zimbabwe Industries.
. . .
As the formal economy keeps shrinking, more and more people have been crowding the area where Mr. Chitiyo sells shirts on Robert Mugabe Road.
Across the street, a girl’s voice was crying, “Twenty-five cents for a cob!” It belonged to Tariro Dongo, 13, on her first evening working as a street vendor. It was past 9 p.m. Tariro said she was good in school and wanted to become a teacher.
She had bought 20 corn cobs for $2 near her home in Epworth, a poor township outside Harare. If she sold everything, her profit, after transportation, would amount to a couple of dollars. Sitting on a black bucket and fanning the coals in a small charcoal burner with a piece of cardboard, Tariro roasted the cobs.
She was happy with the money she had made on her first day, Tariro said.
“Twenty-five cents,” she cried. “One cob left!”

For the full story, see:
NORIMITSU ONISHI and JEFFREY MOYO. “Trade on the Streets, and Off the Books, Keeps Zimbabwe Afloat.” The New York Times, First Section (Sun., MARCH 5, 2017): 6.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date MARCH 4, 2017, and has the title “Trade on Streets, and Off Books, Keeps Zimbabwe Afloat.”)

Liberal Democrat Hesburgh Condems Obama Administration’s Killing School Vouchers

My Chicago professor Milton Friedman proposed educational vouchers in Capitalism and Freedom, a great book based on lectures that Friedman delivered several decades ago at Wabash College at the invitation of my first economics professor, Ben Rogge.
Friedman’s belief was that parents generally care about their children, and will seek a good education for them, if provided the means to choose among credible alternatives.
Special interests are arrayed against this idea, but that does not mean that Friedman was wrong.
Another distinguished educator who supports vouchers (see below) is Father Hesburgh, who for many years was President of Notre Dame in my hometown of South Bend, Indiana.

(p. A19) If Martin Luther King Jr. told me once, he told me a hundred times that the key to solving our country’s race problem is plain as day: Find decent schools for our kids. So I was especially heartened to hear Education Secretary Arne Duncan repeatedly call education the “civil rights issue of our generation.” Millions of our children–disproportionately poor and minority–remain trapped in failing public schools that condemn them to lives on the fringe of the American Dream.

. . .
. . . , I was deeply disappointed when Sen. Richard Durbin (D., Ill.) successfully inserted a provision in last year’s omnibus spending bill that ended one of the best efforts to give these struggling children the chance to attend a safe and decent school.
That effort is called the Opportunity Scholarship program. Since 2004 it has allowed thousands of children in Washington, D.C., to escape one of the worst public school systems in the nation by providing them with scholarships of up to $7,500.
Despite its successes, it is now closing down. On Tuesday the Senate voted against a measure introduced by Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I., Conn.) that would have extended the program. Throughout this process Mr. Duncan’s Education Department and the White House raised no protest.
. . .
I know that some consider voucher programs such as the Opportunity Scholarships a right-wing affair. I do not accept that label. This program was passed with the bipartisan support of a Republican president and Democratic mayor. The children it serves are neither Republican nor Democrat, liberal or conservative. They are the future of our nation, and they deserve better from our nation’s leaders.
I have devoted my life to equal opportunity for all Americans, regardless of skin color. I don’t pretend that this one program is the answer to all the injustices in our education system. But it is hard to see why a program that has proved successful shouldn’t have the support of our lawmakers. The end of Opportunity Scholarships represents more than the demise of a relatively small federal program. It will help write the end of more than a half-century of quality education at Catholic schools serving some of the most at-risk African-American children in the District.
I cannot believe that a Democratic administration will let this injustice stand.

For the full commentary, see:
THEODORE M. HESBURGH. “A Setback for Educational Civil Rights; I cannot believe that a Democratic administration will let this injustice of killing D.C. vouchers stand.” The Wall Street Journal (Thurs., MARCH 18, 2010): A19.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the article was dated MARCH 17, 2010.)
Reference to the Friedman book mentioned above:
Friedman, Milton. Capitalism and Freedom. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1962.

55% of Nebraskans Favor School Vouchers

The Friedman Foundation mentioned in the passage below, was founded by Nobel Prize winning economist Milton Friedman who is often credited with creating the idea of education vouchers in his classic book Capitalism and Freedom.
Capitalism and Freedom was based on a series of lectures that Friedman delivered at Wabash College at the invitation of my much-missed mentor Ben Rogge. (Before teaching me economics in Indiana, Rogge was a native Nebraskan who earned his bachelor’s degree from Hastings College.)

(p. 4B) A majority of Nebraskans are open to school-choice reforms such as school vouchers and tax­-credit scholarships, according to a survey made public Thurs­day by a national school-choice group.

“It really appears Nebraska is ready to start talking about school-choice reform options,” said Paul DiPerna, director of partner services for the Fried­man Foundation for Educational Choice, which commissioned the survey.
The group partnered with the Nebraska Catholic Conference and other state and national groups to conduct the telephone survey of 1,200 likely voters.
Fifty-five percent of those sur­veyed said they favored school vouchers and supported a tax­-credit scholarship system, which would give tax credits to indi­viduals and businesses that con­tribute money to nonprofit orga­nizations that distribute private school scholarships.

For the full story, see:
Dejka, Joe. “Support for school choice tax plan seen; An Indianapolis organization says its survey shows Nebraskans would back a pending bill.” Omaha World-Herald (Fri., Sept. 18, 2009): 4B.