Diagnosing the cost disease

Why government costs can’t go down

Find a cure for Baumol’s Disease and you will be hailed as the benefactor of millions, even though the only people it harms are politicians. Baumol’s Disease strikes the body politic, spec

They’re b-a-a-a-c-k

A cougar is spotted in Morgan County

Everybody read about it – a high-tech hunter got video evidence that confirmed the presence in a Morgan County woods of an adult cougar, only the fourth known to have been sighted in Illinois si

The perils of premature morality

George McGovern and the hope of 1972

A lot of people, I suppose, thought that George McGovern had died a long time ago when they heard in October that he had passed away. Some of them could even have put a date on his demise – elec

The needle and the records won

Should performance-enhancing drugs in sports be legal?

San Francisco, city and club, are famously tolerant of people who don’t play by the book, but Major League Baseball tolerates it only among its umpires. The game’s poobahs have ruled that

Getting there from there

Might an informal “street” network help heal South MacArthur?

South MacArthur Boulevard is a lot like a heart attack patient. It might recover its former vigor, but it will never thrive in the ways it did before it got sick. It will be able to survive at all onl

Has another public project gone off the rails?

The Springfield Rail Improvements Project gets stuck on a siding

We’ve all seen it dozens of times in movies. A railroad train is barreling down the tracks. There might be enough time – just – to bring the lumbering machine to a halt before it cra

The short arm of the law

At last, we can all feel safe when we take our credit cards out in public again. In September, a federal judge in San Francisco fined a Taiwanese company $500 million and sentenced its former presiden

Missing the bus

The SMTD and the American bias against experts

In late August the Springfield Mass Transit District Board chose as its new executive director a retired Corrections Department internal affairs investigator. The new hire’s qualifications to ru

Invisible walls

Why good newspapers need good publishers

I was a newspaper publisher at the age of 24. My aptitude for the job can be judged by the fact that the column you are reading appears in a newspaper that is not published by me. I published two news

Cheating is the American way

What Lance Armstrong teaches us about ourselves

There is no shame in quitting a race you know you can’t win. Lance Armstrong’s shame is the many races he perhaps should have quit rather than win. It was apparently to prevent unsavory fa