15 years ago
April 2007,
The likely result is to not convert a student to campus orthodoxy but to exile her intellectually. Other students only have access to a limited range of ideas. Another woman who is a doctoral student in sociology at Midwestern universities told me that her first exposure to conservative or libertarian blogs was when she saw a lot of different perspectives.
Cathy Young
“The Academic Bias Impact”
“Coyotes brought migrants from other countries to San Diego right away after the Border Patrol constructed the San Diego wall. The barrier did not stop illegal entry, but merely diverted traffic towards other areas of the border. The border communities in Arizona and Texas experienced an explosion of illegal crossings. It was chaos. Authorities built additional walls to shift traffic towards the mountainous and desert regions. Now, the Border Patrol estimates, about 40 percent of all migrants entering the U.S. illegally in the Southwest go through Arizona—most through the desert areas where Vasquez and I met Ramirez and his friends.”
Malia Politzer
“It is our job to stop that dream”
25 years ago
April 1997
The market isn’t a place, a person or an organization. It is a process—a continuously adapting system of trial and error, experiment and feedback, freedom and responsibility. You are rewarded for your creativity, deferred satisfaction, innovation, foresight, and discipline. It allows commercial activity to be possible, but also the creation of countless voluntary associations when people have the liberty to make their own connections. Because it depends not on predetermined status but on contract—on choice and consent—the market is liberating. However, it’s not ‘atomistic’, as some critics suggest. It’s only atomistic in that molecules are formed from atoms, which then creates larger structures.
But, central authority is not undermined by the market. Although the markets create many organizations with different hierarchies or authorities, they do not necessarily establish the best.
Virginia Postrel
“Laissez Fear”
It was 30 years ago
April 1992
In the broadest possible sense of the word, it is a violation of your privacy if someone has information about you that you do not want. The government has always been considered the’someone’ in the past, both in fiction and real life. Recent years have seen the public focus shift to the private sectors, particularly large companies and organisations. Privacy advocates are concerned about many commercial activities including job screenings, credit reporting and direct marketing. They also worry about insurance, medical records, debit-card purchases and toll collection.
These activists don’t seem to be concerned about illegal intrusions into privacy such as wiretaps or unauthorised access to computer files. The standard operating procedures used by credit bureaus and direct marketers as well as retailers who handle computerized data are alarming to them more than the actual methods. You can’t conduct a business transaction today without leaving an electronic trail, sometimes without even realizing.
Jacob Sullum
“Secrets on Sale”
It was 40 years ago
April 1982
“What of the legitimate questions that can be raised about claims of the impropriety of taxation or the morality of resisting it? For example, could society be provided with the necessary legal protection—courts, police, military, etc.—without taxation? Just like so many “practical” men. [then–IRS commissioner Roscoe]Egger never bothered to answer such abstract and philosophical questions. Had he bothered to ask, he would have invited volumes of answers, in the midst of which he might have found out that yes, indeed, solutions to financing public services—bona fide, genuine public services, not the mishmash of special-interest wishes politicians are so eager to lump in with the ‘public sector’—are available. Furthermore, such solutions don’t violate moral fundamentals like the injunction against theft. “
Tibor Machan
Stop Stealing