Real American friends.(Karl Zinsmeister)

TARKIO, MISSOURI -- Several years ago, I found myself in a maximum-security women's prison interviewing a convicted murderer, and the discussion turned to her lesbian lover. At about that point, I asked myself the existential question shared by philosophers and people of a certain age: Uh, why am I here? It was, of course, Karl Zinsmeister's fault. He'd organized a coterie of TAE writers to descend on southern Florida, and invited me to write about its prisons, because, as he said: "You are the only person I can think of who would know how to talk to the prisoners." Years later, I still wonder exactly what he meant by that.

I first met Karl when he was doing a series of articles for Reason magazine, arguing that farm subsidies are a bad idea. He visited our farm along with many others and wrote what is still a definitive criticism of farm subsidies. Later, he organized a hearing on farm policy in the Capitol, featuring several of us farmers willing to betray our class, and headlined by the political odd couple of Barney Frank and Dick Armey.

When the hearing was scheduled, my wife and I happened to be in Washington with the Missouri Farm Bureau on their annual lobbying trip to ask for more farm subsidies. (Yes, there was a slight friction between Karl's farmers and my FB friends.) We were staying in a hotel that had central air, which was fortunate, because the rest of Karl's farmers were staying in a hotel that Karl had picked out, and were sweating out an early heat wave without air conditioning. Karl picked us up in a beater of an automobile, older than we were at the time, and escorted us to the bearing. He was then rehabbing houses while launching his writing career, and was obviously, well, careful with a dollar.

Ending farm subsidies may well be his only professional failure. But there is still time, and in his new job, he will have input into farm policy. And Barney Frank is still around.

When he became the editor of The American Enterprise, Karl wrote me a letter asking me to write once in a while for the magazine. That letter hung on our refrigerator for nearly a decade, until it finally crumbled to dust. He's probably often rued that ...