Last weekend Ramona and I joined 450 others in celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Heartland Institute, a Chicago based think tank. Its mission will resonate with many here. Those concerned with the likely consequences of current federal policies and promises may be heartened by its success — perhaps even find hope for change.

Alert adults recognize that America faces a large and unprecedented range of substantial problems. Each involves complex causal linkages among cultural, demographic, economic, environmental, epidemiological, and financial forces.

Most of these problems entail heavy emotional baggage. When complexity and emotional loadings are high, and powerful interests directly affected, civility and wisdom suffer while opportunism thrives. Health care reform exemplifies one such contentious issue, climate change another.

These problems have complex causes and consequences that far exceed anyone’s ability to understand. Scapegoats are eagerly sought and publicly excoriated. For example, the companies that bring life saving and enhancing drugs are demonized as “Big Pharma.” “Insatiable Insura” may follow; successful minorities beware.

This situation entices ambitious politicians to craft intrusive, often confiscatory, public policies. As Barney Frank explained to Ralph Nader on October 27, given America’s problems, “We are trying on every front to increase the role of government in the regulatory area.” Each advance of political control purports to ameliorate a specified problem.

Politicians and their constituencies claim the dire consequences of these problems grant a license, indeed a mandate, to expand governmental control. Hypocrisy, deceit, and payoffs are inherent and no proposed solution will work as advertised.

Fortunately, such exploitation is exposed and analyzed by organizations such as Heartland. Now there are dozens of them, large and small, offering perspective and constructive alternatives, not mere criticism.

Heartland’s mission is to improve public policy through a principled stand based on individual liberty and limited government. It supports choice in education, incentive-based approaches to environmental protection, and privatization of public services marred by waste. It identifies situations where property rights and markets are more effective and just than government bureaucracies.

Heartland began with a staff of one, Joe Bast, an economics student at the University of Chicago. His annual budget in 1984 was $17,600. Today he directs a staff of 35, enlists dozens of volunteers, and has an annual budget exceeding $7,000,000. Among Heartland’s products are five monthly public policy newspapers on education, environment, health care, budget and tax issues, and telecommunications.

Heartland accepts no corporate contracts and spends much of its energies exposing and fighting corporate welfare. No more than 5 percent of its funding comes from any one source and it takes no funds extracted by force or fraud; in other words, no government money.

I find this success truly remarkable, a tribute to intelligence, entrepreneurial skills, crazy ambition, perseverance, and insulation from political and business pressures. Its driving force is a dedication to liberty, small government, and the rule of law. It is highly sensitive to the abuse of political power. Heartland is, after all, based in Chicago.

Economists are among the last of our sane optimists. I suspect most will disagree with my expectation of America’s decline. Many of them believe our resiliency and creativity will trump the stationary bandits of political predation and rigidities imposed by regulation.

I hope they are right. Perhaps the tide of prosperity will lift most boats, sensible regulation will constrain corporate plunder, consumers will become more prudent, and banks will no longer be able to socialize risk while privatizing profits.

America, however, may experience substantial decline, not merely departure from our post-WWII growth curve promising perpetual prosperity as our birthright. If so, organizations like Heartland, those with a philosophical gyroscope and sound cultural ballast, will be especially valuable.

When times get tough, the classical liberal values expressed in America’s constitution are at risk. Fortunately, America finally has organizations with the will and the capacity to alert citizens of pending dangers and offer alternatives. Heartland stands out among them.