Media and Culture

Like Martha Nussbaum, whose Cultivating Humanity is addressed above, John M. Ellis is concerned with multiculturalism.

In a state-funded education system, bad ideas live longer than they would in a free market. That's the best explanation for the staying power of the two opposing errors of our time: nihilism and pseudo-omniscience in the social sciences.

Extremes like bloody backs distract from the main issue, which is not whether taxpayers should subsidize grotesque performance or perverse photography, but whether they should subsidize art at all. Market theory, of course, follows one simple rule: those who want something should be the ones to pay for it. In particular, those who want art, or a specific kind of art, should put up the money, whether by purchasing tickets or becoming a generous benefactor.

Virginia Postrel gets a lot of mileage from an elementary fallacy. She begins her piece, a plea for Republicans to stress the free market rather than cultural issues, in an odd way. 

To this day Christmas remains a celebration of liberty and private life, as well as a much-needed break from the incessant politicization of modern life. It's the most pro-capitalist of all holidays because its temporal joys are based on private property, voluntary exchange, and mutual benefit.

Eugene Genovese is a Marxist historian, but he is a Marxist of a most unusual kind. In this excellent collection of essays, he continually advocates conservative views, often expressed more trenchantly than is customary among rightists themselves

D'Souza's massive tome is structured by a simple message.

From Left and Right, capitalism is condemned for all the cultural failings of the modern world—everything from mindless TV to dirty books to slatternly art to trashy movies to debasing music. It's an extension of the liberal habit of blaming a system for what are actually the failings of individuals.

In Defense of Advertising is a theoretical defense based on the philosophy of Ayn Rand and the economics of Ludwig von Mises. It argues that the proper foundations of advertising are reason, ethical egoism, and laissez-faire capitalism. Its...

William Graham Sumner is the “forgotten man” of American intellectual history and of the history of liberty. A thinker of extraordinary power, and a person who developed and integrated and thrilling view of the place of liberty in the...