Notable & Quotable: Remembering Charles H. Brunie

Myron Magnet, writing March 11 at City Journal in memory of Charles H. Brunie, a former chairman of the Manhattan Institute who died Feb. 23 at age 86:

There are as many kinds of investors as there are ice cream flavors. Chuck was the highest and rarest kind of all: the intellectual investor. That’s why he so revered Milton Friedman, who could explain economic and financial cycles not as some occult magic but as the rational outcomes of describable forces. . . . You knew that Chuck was about to utter some proposition that would brook no disagreement when he began a sentence with, “Milton says . . .” But those Delphic utterances explain no small part of the Manhattan Institute’s success. “Milton says that a think tank should not draw up a list of policies it wants to advance and then find scholars to expound them,” Chuck pronounced. “Instead, find very smart people who share your worldview, and let them choose their own issues. Then you’ll come up with new and creative ideas, not dogma.” Or: “Milton says that the information revolution allows organizations to be flatter and leaner, with fewer layers of costly and change-inhibiting bureaucrats. We should be like that.” Well, it worked.

This piece originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal's Notable & Quotable, adapted from City Journal

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Myron Magnet, City Journal’s editor-at-large and its editor from 1994 through 2006, is a recipient of the National Humanities Medal. His latest book is The Founders at Home.

This piece originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal