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There are three broad traits that philatelists share with each other. The first is inquisitiveness. Many very intelligent people are quite content with what they know. They do well in their professions and in their life, and their idle time is spent being entertained. Others, people who are receptive to our hobby, love to learn and […]

Make a prediction for long enough, and it is apt to come true. Brazil is a vast country with a large population and prodigious natural resources. In recent years, huge oil deposits have been found in deep water off shore. And Brazil has always had vast hydroelectric potential. The preconditions for economic success have always

There are very few economic activities that Americans engage in that are not either encouraged or discouraged by the tax code. The tax code currently runs to over 70,000 pages and is involved minutely in most of the activities of our lives. We wake up in the morning and dress in clothes made of taxed textiles,

Get a group of sixty year old doctors together, and you are sure to hear complaints about managed care and capitation and MBAs that get between doctors and patients. Lawyers have similar issues. People in the printing and publishing business lament the Internet. And independent booksellers now all seem to work for Barnes and Noble for $8

Like Germany, Japan was devastated as a result of WWII. American bombing had destroyed industrial production, and the war had killed a high percentage of young adult males. Many homes were in ruins, and the electric and telecommunications grid was annihilated. Like Germans, the Japanese are an energetic and frugal people, and by the 1960s,

Early cars had mechanical crank starters. They didn’t work very well, were hard to use, and required the strength of a good sized man to turn them. In cold weather they sometime “kicked”, breaking the hand of the person trying to start his car. Yet even after electric starters were invented, for many years cars were

Postal rate increases have been more modest in the last ten years than they were in the earlier era. Between 1971 and 1981, US postage rates increased from 8

The new movie Hyde Park on the Hudson is the first mainstream movie in years in which stamps and stamp collecting play a major part. The movie is about Roosevelt in the late 1930s at his summer home in Hyde Park, and Roosevelt is portrayed as a person to whom his stamps are very important. He shows

In all the many ways that the hobby of stamp collecting has changed in the last 50 years, probably the most significant has been in the de-emphasis of the “great buy” that was at the heart of philatelic writing in previous generations. Everyone wants a good deal and to get what they pay for (and