This column is an exploratory essay and I welcome your suggestions.  I'm thinking of creating the Greater Yellowstone Policy Salon Series, an adventure in intellectual and policy entrepreneurship.  Let's unpack this new idea and I hope influence change for the better. 

There is a huge potential for policy reform in nearly every arena of American life: environment, entitlements, education, energy, and more.  The Policy Salons will consider these topics with small groups of successful individuals who come to or live in Greater Yellowstone.  We will explore, explain, and perhaps even evangelize innovative policy options favorable to responsible liberty and prosperity. 

We will accomplish this in an attractive environment congenial to exchange and contemplation.  Discussions and meals will be interspersed with the outdoor and cultural activities that make the Bozeman area, and Greater Yellowstone generally, such an attractive place to live and to visit. 

Greater Yellowstone is the geographical and cultural area surrounding Yellowstone Park.  Yellowstone is the world's first national park and one of its best ideas.  (The challenge has always been how to insulate it from political and other opportunistic pressures.)    Yellowstone has near universal and positive recognition.  This is a clear advantage for the Salon Series.

Bozeman is the major launching place for Park exploration.  Hence, Montana State University has become the University of the Yellowstone. This is a happy accident of MSU's location, just two hours north of the Park. (Several years ago when I was on MSU's President's Advisory council and Prof. Jerry Johnson was head of Political Science, we proposed making "University of the Yellowstone" the official University motto or tag line.) Quite naturally, researchers interested in the Park's geology, ecology, climate, and economy are attracted to MSU.

Further, and probably most importantly, Bozeman is a great place to live, visit, and work.  Ramona and I are not here by chance.  We came to teach at MSU while operating a working ranch. 

In the 1970s MSU was generally regarded as an insignificant cow college in the most remote of the lower 48 states.  We both had opportunities to teach at Ivy League schools, Cornell and Yale, but elected to be in the Northern Rockies.  What great decisions!  Bozeman has become ever better.  It's hard to imagine what advantages could trump those of living here. 

In 1978 I created an institute at MSU to focus on natural resources and environmental economics and policy, the Center for Political Economy and Natural Resources.  Paul Craig Roberts, a Ph.D. economist at the Wall Street Journal, learned of our work (I occasionally wrote for the Journal) and attended one of our environmental economics seminars for journalists.  Here's the introduction to his WSJ column reporting on his visit:

The Baden ranch, straddling a bubbling brook in Montana’s Gallatin Valley and back dropped by the Spanish Peaks, is a pretty place.  It is also a productive one specializing in high quality hay and sheep.  Ten years ago it was all gullies and erosion, naked of fence or building.  That was before John Baden saw opportunity in the ruined land and acquired it.  Once again a man restored what (had been ruined), and in the process strengthened on the margin the productive sector of society.

This piece was extremely fortunate for my colleagues and me; it sprinkled holy water from a nationally respected source on our fledgling MSU institute. 

Craig Roberts' WSJ article provided entree to several national foundations. Not surprisingly, in retrospect our institute wasn't viable in a political environment.  While we published in highly respected peer-reviewed economics journals and produced books published by university presses, our work offended too many special interests. 

The then-governor of Montana reacted to our work with extreme disfavor and the institute was forced off campus.  (Actually, the conditions under which we could stay were untenable.)  Fortunately this led me to create two independent organizations, PERC and FREE. 

FREE is nearly three decades old.  It is best known for its twenty years of producing educational conferences for federal judges.  We hosted some 600 visits by America's approximately 1,000 Article III federal judges and featured dozens of presentations by Nobel Prize winners and other distinguished scholars.  FREE has always focused on individuals with substantial influence and leverage. 

Seven years ago we began a seminar series for seminary professors and other religious leaders that is similar to the one we created for federal judges.  (We include a few federal judges in these programs.)  I consider these programs successful examples of intellectual entrepreneurship.  What is next?  I hope it is the Greater Yellowstone Policy Salon Series.

Montana is better known for its saloons, many named The Mint, than its salons.  A salon is a gathering of individuals interested in discussing intellectual and cultural topics in a pleasant place, usually accompanied by good food and drinks.  I intend the proposed Greater Yellowstone Policy Salon Series to do precisely this.

Will this effort be successful?  I know that the great majority of entrepreneurial ventures fail.  However, Bozeman is an ever more attractive place to visit.  Concurrently, national interest in libertarian and classical liberal perspectives is increasing.  I expect this trend to accelerate. 

The failure of large scale, top down governmental programs is becoming obvious to all but the ignorant and willfully blind.  Exploring alternative means of achieving social, economic, and environmental goals surely is a worthy enterprise. 

Here is the intellectual foundation underlying my proposed Greater Yellowstone Policy Salon Series.  Political Economy provides the analytical framework for understanding successful policy reforms--and for explaining perverse outcomes.  I consider it a branch of behavioral ecology. 

But ecology has been largely neglected in libertarian and classical liberal thinking.  However, as Paul Craig Roberts noted in his WSJ article decades ago, Bozeman is the epicenter of creative work in this arena.  I'll report on progress--and welcome your suggestions as I initiate the Greater Yellowstone Policy Salon.