From the Archives
20 Years Ago August/September 1998
"Employers should have every right to restrict speech, forbid the display of pictures, or limit dating on the job. But when the state and the courts impose these rules, which businesses adopt 'voluntarily' to avert legal action, that's a different matter."
Cathy Young
"Groping Toward Sanity"
"Effectively the right is arguing what it has always argued: Suffer this and the world will come undone. 'This' has been the vote for women, access to high culture for those without educations, admission to law schools and medical schools for 'outsiders.' 'This' was always made to seem the last defense of civilization, the innovation that would send the world into a downward spiral from which recovery was impossible. And…nothing happened."
Grant McCracken
"The Politics of Plenitude"
"Time is the real currency of life, and the value of our time—what we can acquire for its exchange—is our most important asset."
W. Michael Cox and Richard G. Alm
"Buying Time"
35 Years Ago September 1983
"The more-progressive bureaucrats of the '70s, however, argued that a bit more freedom should go into the next orgy of gasoline rationing. Everyone would still be issued coupons, each with a fixed quota of weekly gasoline attached. But…these would be negotiable and saleable in a legal 'white market.' If the coupon entitled you to, say, 20 gallons a week, you could buy one or more coupons from fellow citizens at whatever price would be set by the interplay of supply and demand. And so a little bit of freedom was to be permitted within the matrix of a rotten situation. The scheme must have been dreamed up by some economist. Me, I prefer the old-style black market. It is freer and basically more honest, if (alas) illegal."
Murray N. Rothbard
"Coupon Caper"
"The opponents of advertising are puritans, tormented by the distressing thought that someone, somewhere, might be happy. They condemn the masses' tastes as shoddy, their values as ugly, their pleasures as trivial, and their enjoyment of earthy, concrete things as materialistic. They are terrifyingly confident in the privileged status of their own tastes and see nothing amiss in imposing these upon their fellows."
John K. Williams
"And Now, a Pitch for Advertising"
"I interviewed one grower who, to comply with the [Agricultural Labor Relations Act] requirement that he provide the union with a list of all his employees along with their current home addresses and phone numbers, had xeroxed the information from his employee payroll cards. He was served [an unfair labor practice] charge because three of his employees had listed a post office box as their residence address. He called the three employees into his office, but they refused to give him a home address, explaining that they didn't want to have their families harassed or intimidated by [United Farm Workers] organizers."
Patty Newman
"Harvest of Power"
40 Years Ago August 1978
"Advocates of liberty should take advantage of this anti-tax climate. Whenever possible they should seek to discredit taxation in principle, explaining why extracting money from people by force is wrong and providing practical alternatives."
Robert Poole Jr.
"California Tea Party"
"Hardly anyone acknowledges that many, if not most, of the problems encountered [by minorities] are due neither to group nor to individual incompetence but rather are due to the excesses of governments dominated by politically powerful interest groups."
Walter E. Williams
"The New Jim Crow Laws"
"Civilizations don't die by exhausting their resources. They die by consuming the institutions that made their vitality possible."
Phillip Gramm
"Debunking Doomsday"
50 Years Ago September 1968
"The demand for amnesty, in principle and effect, is a demand that future acts of violence be sanctioned in advance. If a blatant case of rights-violation can be excused today, on what principle can further and more flagrant violations be opposed tomorrow?"
Lanny Friedlander
"On Student Brutality: Columbia"
"The method by which the Post Office handles the mail has not changed significantly since the 19th century. It is still hand-carried and hand-sorted. Consider the irony of the most technologically advanced nation in the world reduced to the anachronism of transporting tons of hand-sorted paper, in order to communicate. This is the legacy of government ownership."
Lanny Friedlander
"Why Not a Laissez Faire Postal System?"
This article originally appeared in print under the headline "From the Archives."