Colin McNickle At Large

Another year done: Our responsibility

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More than 200 commentaries later – At Large columns and op-eds in support of our Policy Briefs — another year draws to a close. And it has been another year of this public policy institute’s learned analyses and scholarly commentaries at times being, as Benjamin Franklin noted in another era, “frequently censured and condemned by different persons for printing things they say ought not to be printed.”

In 2022, that would include many “leaders” — those in private commerce and those supposedly doing the “public’s business” — who have dishonored the very concept of sound public policy, if not leadership.

But unlike old Ben, whose words come from a 1731 editorial in The Pennsylvania Gazette, we offer no apologies for our positions. For they have remained a steady and trustworthy beacon illuminating myriad paths regularly turned foggy by purveyors of government-knows-best command economics, aficionados of “woke economic progressivism” (i.e., socialism) and national, state and/or regional “industrial policy,” cackling corporatists and their acolytes defending their diving into your pockets, all believing liberty and free markets are but quaint and outmoded precepts.

The evergreen debate regarding the proper role and function of government remained chief among the issues on which we’ve expounded this year. Our positions have been consistent and clear. Never have you found — nor ever will you ever find — weasel words masquerading as analyses.

And as 2023 bows, we shall continue to expose and expound on the mountebankery that’s sure to follow, be it around the commonwealth, around the region or around the corner.

If criticism is deserved — and sometimes fact-based stinging critiques we have offered — it will be delivered in the appropriate meter. If praise is due — and praise, sometimes profuse, we generously have bestowed — it will be delivered in proper measure as well.

But even our dissents from others of general like mind, whom we feel have missed the mark, must never be mistaken for disloyalty to the cause of finding free-market and less-intrusive government solutions to our mutual challenges. For we firmly believe that the negative consequences of unchallenged, misguided “solutions” are a far greater threat to our liberties and fortunes than healthy dissent, robust debate and free markets and less regulation ever could be.

Hence, it is in this spirit in which we wholeheartedly subscribe to Mr. Franklin’s directive in that same 18th-century dispatch to “request all who are angry” with us “on account of printing things they don’t like (to) calmly consider these following particulars”:

• “That the opinions of men are almost as various as their faces …”

• “That the business of printing has chiefly to do with men’s opinions; most things that are printed tending to promote some, or opposite other …”

• “That it is unreasonable in any one man or set of men to expect to be pleased with everything that is printed …”

• “Printers are educated in the belief that when men differ in opinion, both sides ought equally to have the advantage of being heard by the public; and that when truth and error have fair play, the former is always an overmatch for the latter …”

• “That if all printers were determined not to print anything till they were sure it would offend nobody, there would be very little printed.”

As with printers, as with public policy analysts.

Our commitment to you is to fight the worthy battle against avarice and contemporary iniquities, wherever they occur and no matter their convention, and for sound public policies that promote free-market solutions and place a governor on ever-expanding, over-regulating and ever-intrusive government.

You expected no less of us in 2022. And we promise not to shrink from our sacred responsibility in 2023.

Happy New Year!

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Colin McNickle
Colin McNickle

Colin received his B.G.S. from Ohio University. The 40-year journalism veteran joined the Institute in October 2016. That followed a 22-year career with the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, 18 as director of editorial pages for Trib Total Media. Prior that, Colin had a long and varied career in media — from radio, newspapers and magazines, to United Press International and The Associated Press.

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