Choice: The Best of Reason

Rating:
Summary: Giving the (Often) Voiceless a Voice!
Review: Being a libertarian, I am often in a position of feeling quite equally distant from both the 'right' and the 'left.' The 'right' seeems to champion free-market principles and less government, but will defend regulation at the drop of a hat when freedom produces results it feels are immoral. By comparison, the 'left' champions such freedoms as that of speech and press and the rights of criminal defendants to due process, but argues for government incursion into most every area of the free market. What is a poor libertarian (believing in all of these freedoms at once) to do?

The answer: we turn to magazines like "Reason." This book consists of a good number of articles that Reason has published in recent years in defense of all that is liberty. As with any collection of disperate articles written over a span of many years, some articles are better than others (and, yes, I skipped a few of the worse ones). All in all, though, this book deserves four stars for writing forcefully and soundly on issues that concern the libertarian position (a position sorely lacking from dialogue dominated by the orthodox "left" and "right").

The book starts off with a bang - an article called "In Praise of Vulgarity" which argues that the role of entertainers pushing the envelope has done more than anything to break the traditionalistic strangle-hold on the culture(s) of the middle east. From there, we move to articles which argue that the commercialization of culture is a good thing, that anti-immigration policies hurt all involved, that the drug war is a cure worse than the disease, etc.

Perhaps most engaging, though, were the various interviews contained in these pages. Reason has interviewed the likes of John Stossel, Christopher Hitchens, Milton Friedman, Dave Barry, and even a few key characters involved in the war on drugs who now oppose that effort. So engaging were these interviews that I began wishing either that this volume had, or a future one will, focus EXCLUSIVELY on interviews done by the magazine.

The only other observation I had was that at least to me, that the articles seemed to decline in quality the later their placement in the book. Most of my favorite articles (described tow paragraphs up) appeared within the first 150 pages. The second half of the book contains such duds as an examination of the QWERTY keyboard (and its relation to market principles), a profile of an early 19th century "exploitation" film to do with sex, and some other seemingly trivial essays. Other than that, the book is still quite solid.