The image from the 1977 flick still is with me. The economic lesson of the cooper and his amputated feet is one that would have served as guidance a few years back when Indiana’s governor and legislature saw fit to lease—for seventy-five (75) years—the Indiana Toll Road. The notion, as one popular blogger has said, was to pay for Indiana’s backed-up road projects that were sorely in need of money.

   The problem with the solution—the 75-year lease of the Indiana Toll Road to a…

   People purport to hate negative political ads on TV.  By "negative ads" I mean ads aimed mainly at trashing one candidate.  Polls that I have read consistently indicate over 60 percent (60%) of respondents do not like negative ads. Yet research and personal observation indicate negative political ads "work." They motivate some people to move, not so much "for" one candidate, but "against" the candidate at whom the ad is aimed (thereby helping the candidate in whose interest the ad was…

   The Indiana General Assembly is comprised of he House of Representatives (100 members) and the Senate (50 members). Members of the House serve two-year terms. Members of the Senate serve four-year terms. Every two years all of the seats of the House and half of the seats of the Senate are on the ballot.

   That means all of the current members of the House and half of the members of the Senate (absent a member here or there who resigned because of scandal; such is politics) ran for…

   In America, the desire for (more) money and material things is viewed as a positive quality. It drives the economy. It is the dynamic behind the free market. In the couple of weeks since the disaster at the State Fairs, plaintiffs' law firms have made an embarrassment of our profession in their efforts to be first to jump in and show themselves to be the champions of the downtrodden---the downtrodden being those who lost their lives or were injured when the stage collapsed before…

Amend the Indiana Constitution: no more 50-year contracts.

Politicians like to give the image of having successfully solved a problem, with little or no cost to the average citizen. The average citizen is happy with this fairy tale. After all, taxes are bad. Higher taxes are even worse. So if a mayor gets money into, for an example, his city, and shortfalls are met and little projects are built, things are marvy-poo for John Q. Public and his spouse Jane. Let us say, for our…