25 Years Ago in Reason

July 1982

From the July 2007 issue

“The leaders of Kampuchea [the official name of Communist Cambodia] seemed to take revolutionary pride in the fact that everyone in the new Cambodia was at last equally poor.”
—Thomas M. Magstadt, “The Great Leap Downward”

“Every facet of cable—who provides it, who gets it, what you see, and what you pay—is the prize in a frantic scramble by big-time political interests in every city hall in America.”
—Tom Hazlett, “The Viewer Is the Loser!”

“The federal government has determined that anybody has the ability to pump gas. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration is lifting its 11-year ban on nozzle latches, the devices that allow motorists to do whatever they want with their hands while gas flows, unassisted, into tanks.”
—Mark Edward Crane, “Look Ma! No Hands!”

“The issue of comparable worth…marks a stage beyond which there are no fundamentally new worlds left to conquer. For comparable worth is more than an intervention in the free market—it is a denial of the possibility of a free market.”
—Peter Schwartz, “Women’s Worth”