The New Republic

I've been holding off weighing in on Justin Fox's fitting new book, The Myth of the Rational Market--a kind of intellectual history of the idea that markets know best--mostly because I haven't had a chance to read it yet and didn't want to go off half-cocked. I still intend to do that and report back. READ MORE >>

The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism By Naomi Klein (Metropolitan Books, 576 pp., $28) READ MORE >>

The New Yorker is hardly the optimal vehicle for reaching the conservative intelligentsia. But, last year, Barack Obama cooperated with a profile for that magazine where he seemed to be speaking directly to the right. Because he paid obeisance to the virtues of stability and continuity, his interlocutor, Larissa MacFarquhar, came away with the impression that the Illinois senator was an adherent of Edmund Burke: "In his view of history, in his respect for tradition, in his skepticism that the world can be changed any way but very, very slowly, Obama is deeply conservative." READ MORE >>

by Richard Stern READ MORE >>

by Richard Stern I didn't know Milton Friedman well but yesterday, reading of his death, I felt that special grief which means the loss of another part of one's life. Death, like a novelist, assembles the contacts and associations one has had with the dead person and then makes some sense out of what had been more or less incidental encounters. To my surprise, my assemblage is fairly large, much too large to recount in this post. In addition to READ MORE >>

by Eric Rauchway READ MORE >>

READ ABOUT U.S. EFFORTS to seal the Mexican border, and you quickly encounter two words. The first is futile. Take this June 5 dispatch in U.S. News & World Report, which reports on the "deep sense of futility" about illegal immigration in the town of Nogales, on the Arizona-Mexico border. "The number of Border Patrol agents has increased more than 200 percent in less than 15 years.... Yet the number of people estimated to cross the border illegally each year has remained fairly constant, at about half a million. READ MORE >>

AT A TOWN-HALL meeting last month in Philadelphia, Rick Santorum, the stalwart conservative senator from Pennsylvania, was pitching President Bush’s plan to privatize Social Security, speaking the reassuringly nonideological language of insolvency dates and rates of return. It fell to a sympathetic college student in the audience, blessedly unversed in the arts of message discipline, to state what conservatives truly think—and have always thought— about Social Security. “I want to know what problem everybody has with taking care of themselves,” she said. READ MORE >>

Imagine that God were to appear on Earth for the unlikely purpose of settling, once and for all, our disputes over economic policy. And suppose that, to my enormous surprise, he announced that every empirical claim advanced by conservatives was correct. Cutting taxes produces such great economic growth that even the poor benefit. Privatizing or eliminating social programs like Medicare and Social Security will cause the elderly to save more money and enjoy higher living standards. READ MORE >>

Imagine that God were to appear on Earth for the unlikely purpose of settling, once and for all, our disputes over economic policy. And suppose that, to my enormous surprise, he announced that every empirical claim advanced by conservatives was correct. Cutting taxes produces such great economic growth that even the poor benefit. Privatizing or eliminating social programs like Medicare and Social Security will cause the elderly to save more money and enjoy higher living standards. READ MORE >>