James L. Payne (Jim) has worked as a piano tuner and pipe organ technician, piano teacher, forest fire fighter, apartment maintenance technician, and Christmas tree shearer as well as a scholar and writer. Jim earned his doctorate in political science at the University of California at Berkeley in 1968, and has taught at Yale, Wesleyan, Johns Hopkins, and Texas A&M University. In 1985 he became an independent researcher and free lance writer and moved to Sandpoint, Idaho. He is the author of 23 books, including works on Latin American politics, social science methodology, defense policy, Congress, taxation, and the motivation of politicians. His articles have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Reader’s Digest, Fortune and many other publications. In 1996 he was awarded a Bradley Fellowship at the Heritage Foundation to study the welfare system. The resulting book, Overcoming Welfare; Expecting More from the Poor--and from Ourselves, was published by Basic Books in June 1998. He has edited a volume of writings by 19th-century social worker Octavia Hill, The Befriending Leader; Social Assistance without Dependency (Lytton, 1997). In 2004 he published A History of Force; Exploring the worldwide movement against habits of coercion, bloodshed, and mayhem. Covering dozens of coercive practices, including war, homicide, capital punishment, and taxation, the book finds a broad historical trend against force. In 2010 he published Six Political Illusions, a primer on government that explains the fallacies that lead to big government. In 2013 he published (under the pen name Count Nef) Take Me to Your Government, a book of political fables for younger minds. Payne is also an avid sea kayaker and has written (as author Jim Payne) four books about his long-distance adventures: One Inch above the Water; Running away on America’s Rivers; Discovering England from One Inch above the Thames; Worlds to Discover; and Chasing Thoreau An adventure in Paddling and Philosophy.