An individual should hesitate before accepting a position as sole executor of an estate. This advice is as sound today as it was in 1983, when this list of an estate executor’s tasks appeared in Preserving Capital and Making it Grow.

The failure of the “super committee” to agree on debt reduction, like the summer kerfuffle over raising the debt limit, is by no means just the result of perverse factionalism by two stubborn sets of politicians. It is a necessary test of the fundamental direction of the Republic. We are deciding what kind of government we want.

Today’s Argentinian cowhands are called gauchos, but that is a somewhat misleading term. The real gauchos dwelt on the pampas in Argentina in past centuries and while gentle and courteous may have been the wildest and freest men who ever existed.