Culture

Many corporations try to win warm-and-fuzzy images in the public mind by touting their charitable efforts. But as the saying goes, charity begins at home. In the early 1970s, Milton Friedman wrote a seminal article titled “The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits.” This echoes what he wrote in Capitalism and Freedom some years before: “In such an economy [i.e., a free economy], […]

Governments decree official language use, but the population decides for itself. Recently I bought a copy of Garner’s Modern American Usage, a language reference book that can be read for fun and profit. Perusing it this morning, I noted this entry: Michigander; Michiganian; Michiganite. By popular consensus, Michigander is the predominant form, appearing more than twice as often in print as Michiganian (the form decreed by state statute). Michiganite […]

Today’s Wall Street Journal takes on the ultra-secularist grinches who are “trying their best to strip from our public squares any hint of what most Americans will actually be celebrating come Christmas morn.” The latest tactic: renaming Christmas trees as “holiday trees.” Not having an established church is fine, and solidly grounded in the Constitution. But the matter has gone to absurd lengths. As the Journal […]