Joseph Coletti

More than 1,200 volunteers across 57 North Carolina counties have been trained to help in case of disasters, search and rescue operations, terrorist attack, or fire. Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) programs get volunteers ready to supplement first responders. A Stateline story explains, “It [CERT] launched in response…

Until a week ago, I had never considered reading V.S. Naipaul, the 2001 Nobel laureate for literature. City Journal editor Brian Anderson gave a brief appreciation of Naipaul’s writing in explaining why The Masque of Africa was on his summer reading list. The discussion pointed to Naipaul’s…

“U.S. social policy is built on a foundation of values,” AEI’s Michael Strain writes at Bloomberg.com in getting to the heart of why reforming most government programs creates such heated debate.  Most discussion of work requirements, eligibility, and the costs and benefits of social programs begs the questions of personal…

From the headline to the details, everything about a recent North Carolina Health News story illustrates what is wrong with the way too many government programs try to help. The program in this case is the US Department of Agriculture’s Summer Food Service Program, which is intended to provide…

Deirdre McCloskey (no) and Jason Furman (yes) will be debating at economist.com over the next week whether capitalism is rigged. Furman opens with a claim about how powerful interests help write regulations. McCloskey begins with the innovation of the past two hundred years. The debate comes down to the…

Michael Tomasky, editor of the journal Democracy, has advice for those who would like fewer socialists. “Stop creating them.” Tomasky outlines a number of ways that cronies in government and business have helped one another without doing much good for the rest of society. Free market supporters from…

New York’s state comptroller divested that state’s pension funds from two private prison companies that operate immigration detention centers. The California State Teachers’ Retirement System faced pressure from “hundreds of educators” among its 933,410 members to do the same, but has opted to keep its investment and “to communicate with…

A number of towns and cities have gone overbudget and lack the staff or oversight to successfully manage their finances warned State Auditor Beth Wood and Revenue Secretary Ronald Penny at a recent Local Government Commission meeting. The biggest problem is their small size. In the most recent estimate from the…