For those of us who harbor some nostalgic sentiment for this country’s agrarian past…

I’ve written previously about the corrosive effect of subsidies on American agriculture. Now, Denis Boyles, in a thoughtful piece on NRO, notes from a similar perspective the importance of entrepreneurial thinking in preserving the agricultural towns of rural America.

Here’s one piece:

When I asked Genna M. Hurd, the co-director of the Kansas Center for Community Economic Development at the University of Kansas and an expert in munities, what made the difference between a town that lived and a town that died, I expected her to give me the old saw about how it takes a school to save a town. Instead, she answered simply, “Local leadership and vision.”