My beloved home, the University of Southern California, has received a gift of $50 million from the Price Family Foundation in the honor of Sol Price.

I’m thrilled with this gift for obvious reasons, but mostly because Sol Price sounds like he was one really wonderful guy. With the Costco model, Price and his successor have disproved people that have said you can’t turn a profit if you work with unions, if you give people a living wage, or if you ensure benefits. That’s what I’d like to think we try to do here at USC: there are markets, there are institutions, there are individuals, there are groups; and the role of civil society is to mediate among all these. Our job as scholars of public policy is to foster that mediation through research and teaching.

Living up to that idea is another story…