Articles 2024
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Got Milk?
Forbes, January 09, 2000
WHEN PROTESTERS TOOK TO THE STREETS of Seattle to denounce international trade, there were no reports of milk mustaches among their many colorful costumes. But the look would have been appropriate. One of the best examples of the protesters' ideals in action can be found in the dairy case of every California supermarket.
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Sometimes the Patient Knows Best
The New York Times, January 03, 2000
LOS ANGELES -- The Internet's abundance -- of information, goods, tastes and sources of authority -- creates unparalleled opportunities for individuals to get exactly what they want. But this plenitude threatens political and cultural authorities who believe in telling individuals what they can have rather than letting them choose for themselves. It was inevitable, therefore, that the growth of the Internet would lead to complaints that its diversity undermines media standards, traditional morality and political authority. It was inevitable that the Internet would face calls for censorship.
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Surprise!
The Wall Street Journal, January 02, 2000
From the late 19th century through the middle of the 20th, futurists imagined electric lighting, but no electric guitars; supersonic jets, but no hang gliders; laser weapons, but no laser surgery or compact disks; giant computer databases, but no Palm Pilots or video games; nuclear power, but no nuclear medicine; government surveillance cameras, but no baby monitors.
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"High-Tech's Starr Report"
The consequences of a software culture war.
Reason, January 2000
On November 5, U.S. District Court Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson released the high-tech version of the Starr report: the finding of facts in the antitrust case against Microsoft. It is as angry and, in its own way, as lurid a document as Kenneth Starr's account. And it is also the product of a culture war
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"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
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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.
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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.
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"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
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"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
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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.