Articles 1999
-
"Reactionary Running Mates"
Susan Faludi sounds like Pat Buchanan.
Reason, December 1999
If Pat Buchanan is going to run for president, he’ll need a running mate. And with the Reform Party a shambles, he needs to get creative, to find someone who can attract positive attention and reach out to a different base
-
Who's in Charge? You Are.
Forbes, November 28, 1999
THE COUNTRY IS IN A RECORD-BREAKING economic expansion, high-tech zillionaires are popular heroes, almost half the population owns stock, and unemployment is at frictional levels in many places. People in their 20s can barely conceive of a world where you have to take the first job offer, put up with a bad boss or stick with work you don't like.
-
What Really Scares Microsoft
The New York Times, November 08, 1999
LOS ANGELES -- A federal judge has made it official: Microsoft is a monopoly, a two-ton bully that squashes competitors and cheats consumers. Still, no matter how much the government lawyers crow or Bill Gates complains, the fact is that the real future of the software industry is already being decided entirely outside the court system -- in a technological marketplace too fast-moving and too accepting of good new ideas to be artificially held in check.
-
"External Cost"
The dangers of calling everything pollution.
Reason, November 1999
The Problem of Social Cost," begins with a shocking observation: "Externalities" are reciprocal. They aren't a matter of physical invasion, with good guys and bad guys, but of unpriced impacts of any sort. We may recognize that an action inflicts a spillover harm, but stopping that action inflicts a different spillover harm
-
"After Socialism"
Now the greatest threats to freedom come from those seeking stability and the "one best way."
Reason, November 1999
In 1947, The Road to Serfdom had been a sensation only a few years earlier. The 39 founding members included future Nobel laureate economists Milton Friedman, George Stigler, and Maurice Allais (and Hayek himself) as well as such luminaries as philosophers Karl Popper and Michael Polanyi and Hayek's mentor Ludwig von Mises. Through intellectual camaraderie and rigorous discussion, they sought to achieve "the rebirth of a liberal movement in Europe" and, by implication, the rest of the world
-
The Esthetics Police
Forbes, October 30, 1999
ON A CORNER OF WILSHIRE BOULEVARD, at the edge of Westwood Village below UCLA, rises a strange monument to the tangled relations between art, commerce, regulation and expression in contemporary America.
-
Dynamism, Stasis, and Popular Culture
Camden Technology Conference, "Pop!Tech", October 23, 1999
Instead of talking about the Internet, I want to start with a technology we take for granted. This is a portable CD player. This particular one is a pretty fancy model and costs $70--you can get them for half that much. Seventy dollars is about a day's work, after taxes, for the average blue-collar American worker, or what the Census Bureau calls "production and nonsupervisory employees." You still have to buy the disks, of course, but a couple more days' work will supply a good collection, especially if you shop for used CDs. The sound will be perfect, and the disks won't wear out. -
A World with All Kinds of Music
Intellectual Capital, October 22, 1999
Obituary writers marked the recent death of Sony co-founder Akio Morita primarily as a reminder of business and technological success. Morita, in most accounts, symbolized the rise of Japanese industry from the ashes of World War II. But Morita also represented one of the greatest cultural transformations of the 20th century, a transformation in which Sony played an important, but by no means singular, role: the spread of on-demand, increasingly personalized music. -
A Niche of One's Own
Forbes ASAP, October 03, 1999
A recent study from Xerox PARC seems to confirm what some critics have long feared: that the Web is fostering not diversity but a "winner-takes-all" world.
-
"Dangerous Remedy"
The other problem with extending Medicare.
Reason, October 1999
Bill Clinton has done some incredibly reckless, irresponsible things as president. But his campaign to expand Medicare entitlements has to rank among the worst