Free Republic

Behind the Headlines by Justin RaimondoAntiwar.com April 8, 2002 WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA POSTREL?Post-9/11: Who speaks for libertarianism – the Old Right or the Neocon Clones? A note from the author: I apologize, in advance, for the sheer length of this column, but since it addresses the sell-out of basic libertarian principles by people and institutions who purport to speak in its name, I thought it important to address these questions thoroughly, with extensive quotations from those I name. Too bad, in attacking Antiwar.com, these pathetic losers didn't do the same – but then what can one expect from craven...

I think I must have been ill that day. At some point, no one can say precisely when, libertarians apparently swore a feudal oath of fealty to the Republican Party. In response to an American Prospect article on libertarian disenchantment with the Bush administration, Reason's own former editor in chief Virginia Postrel explained that "real Dean voters don't like Jeff Flake. (I do.)" On the Crossfire view of politics, this makes sense: You pick your team and root for it, come hell or high water. The Platonic Real Dean Voter can't possibly hold any affection for a member of the...

Mitch Daniels on American Conservatism In this interview, which helps define an emerging political figure, possible Presidential contender for 2012 Mitch Daniels plants himself firmly on the dynamist, anti-traditionalist side of the conservative divide. Two of the books you’ve chosen are about freedom and two are about social dynamism. Hayek’s Road to Serfdom, I would say, is about both. It’s also the first of these books to be published, in 1944. Do you want to start with that one? Hayek, when I thumb back through it and look at what I marked when I first read it, was the book...

Former Reason magazine Editor in Chief Virginia Postrel has seen the strengths and the shortcomings of the American health care system both as a kidney donor and a breast cancer survivor. She argues that individuals should be free to sell their organs, and that encouraging organ markets may be the best way to save the lives of the more than 100,000 Americans currently awaiting transplants. A 2009 article Postrel wrote for the Atlantic Monthly highlights her experience with the ultra-expensive wonder drug, Herceptin, and the perils of centrally controlling health care costs...

One day's obituaries reveal the blind spots of the opinion establishment. On the day of the California primary, an all-but-meaningless election with record-low turnout, two famous men died, both in their early 80s. One was Edmund Muskie, former senator, briefly secretary of state, and the candidate wistful Democrats like to imagine might have been their 1972 nominee if not for a dirty trick and tears in the snow. (They forget, conveniently, that McGovernites had engineered the delegate-selection rules.) Muskie's obituary took 82 column inches in The Washington Post, 84 in The New York Times. The other man--eulogized in a mere...

Every well-traveled cosmop­olite knows that America is mind-numbingly monotonous—the most boring country to tour, because everywhere looks like everywhere else,” as the columnist Thomas Friedman once told Charlie Rose. Boston has the same stores as Denver, which has the same stores as Charlotte or Seattle or Chicago. We live in a “Stepford world,” says Rachel Dresbeck, the author of Insiders’ Guide to Portland, Oregon. Even Boston’s historic Faneuil Hall, she complains, is “dominated by the Gap, Anthropologie, Starbucks, and all the other usual suspects. Why go anywhere? Every place looks the same.” This complaint is more than the old worry,...

Note: This commentary was delivered by Prison Fellowship President Mark Earley. What’s the most important thing most of us will do? The answer is, obviously, raise our kids. And that’s what New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote in his New Year’s Day column, but believe it or not, he caught all sorts of grief. Brooks was responding to a recent piece in the American Prospect by Linda Hirshman of Brandeis. She criticized the idea that “staying home with the kids is just one more feminist option.” For Hirshman, “the family—with its repetitious, socially invisible, physical tasks— . . ....

Consumer Vertigo A new wave of social critics claim that freedom’s just another word for way too much to choose. Here’s why they’re wrong. Virginia Postrel When customers enter the Ralphs supermarket near UCLA, they see a sign announcing how many different fruits and vegetables the produce department has on hand: “724 produce varieties available today,” it says, including 93 organic selections. Sixty dozen varieties is a mind-boggling number. And that’s just in the produce department. Over in the cheese section, this pretty run-of-the-mill supermarket offers 14 types of feta alone. Not so long ago, finding feta of any type...

Economists argue for free trade. They have two centuries of theory and experience to back them up. And they have recent empirical studies of how the liberalization of trade has increased productivity in less-developed countries like Chile and India. Lowering trade barriers, they maintain, not only cuts costs for consumers but aids economic growth and makes the general public better off. Even so, free trade is a tough sell. "The truth of the matter is that we have one heck of a time explaining these benefits to the larger public, a public gripped by free trade fatigue," the economist Daniel...

When patriotic country music fans sing Lee Greenwood's lyric ''I'm proud to be an American, where at least I know I'm free,'' what do they mean? Is Greenwood's idea of freedom the same as Bruce Springsteen's or Francis Scott Key's? And is this freedom the same as the liberty of the Declaration of Independence, the Pledge of Allegiance or the statue in New York Harbor? In ''Liberty and Freedom,'' David Hackett Fischer, a historian at Brandeis University, argues that we cannot learn how most Americans understand freedom by studying political theory or intellectual debates. ''Most Americans do not think of...

Economics and Islam THE 9/11 Commission report pointedly criticizes the idea of a generic threat from terrorism. "The catastrophic threat at this moment in history is more specific," the commission writes. "It is the threat posed by Islamist terrorism." Islamists, who favor political rule based on Islamic principles, see liberal Western societies, particularly the United States, as godless and barbarous. They argue that the Muslim world has fallen behind the West economically and militarily because Muslims have strayed from the pure religious practice of Muhammad's time.As the commission report suggests, Americans know this theocratic ideology primarily as a spur to...

ESSAY A Prettier Jobs Picture? By VIRGINIA POSTREL Published: February 22, 2004 Productivity has risen rapidly over the past year, to the astonishment and delight of most economists. But a lot of people are still worried. What if increased productivity means that jobs disappear? Could the economy get too efficient? All over the world, even in China, factories are producing more stuff with fewer workers. On the Internet, visionaries fret over the rise of robots, while programmers denounce American companies for ''outsourcing'' their once-secure jobs to Indian engineers. Is this the recession -- or the recovery -- that does...

January 29, 2004ECONOMIC SCENEThe Trend of Vanishing Tech JobsBy VIRGINIA POSTREL ANY American computer programmers complain that they're losing their jobs to lower-paid workers in India. The trend toward foreign "outsourcing" has become a political flashpoint.But the trend is less frightening and more promising than you'd think from either the angry talk from unemployed programmers or the scary estimates from consulting firms, argues Catherine L. Mann, an economist at the Institute for International Economics in Washington.First, the end of the technology boom, the general economic slump, and the downturn in manufacturing - not foreign programming competition - account for most...

Dismissed by critics as a free-market extremist, economist Friedrich Hayek is gaining new attention as a forerunner of cognitive psychology, information theory, even postmodernism. A reintroduction to one of the most important thinkers you've barely heard of. AT A RECENT think-tank luncheon in Raleigh, economist Bruce J. Caldwell chatted with a local lawyer active in Democratic party circles. The man asked Caldwell what his new book was about. "It's an intellectual biography of Friedrich Hayek," replied Caldwell, a professor at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. He got a blank look. "He was an economist. A libertarian economist." What an...

As Christmas lights go up on homes around the country, you've probably noticed that the displays seem to get more elaborate every year. No longer does decorating a single evergreen in the front yard suffice. Every tree demands its own ropes of light, wrapping trunks as well as branches. Ubiquitous icicle lights drape even the most generic tract home in sparkling abundance. Arbiters of taste may clash over the merits of white versus colored bulbs, and energy Puritans may denounce the inessential use of electricity. But even stylistic snobs can't entirely deny the appeal of a thousand points of holiday...

Why Buffy Kicked Ass The deep meaning of TV’s favorite vampire slayer Virginia Postrel When Buffy the Vampire Slayer premiered on the WB Network in 1996, American culture was in trouble. Americans were bowling alone, pursuing individual interests to the detriment of the communal good. Business leaders were celebrating creativity and neglecting discipline. Nike’s "Just do it" ads were teaching young people to break the rules. Hollywood was turning out "nightmares of depravity."Americans had forgotten bourgeois virtue. Freedom and affluence had made us soft. We were self-indulgent moral nihilists -- materialistic, selfish, and impulsive. We might have been having fun,...