One of my interests these days is defending Wal-Mart against the misguided barbs of its critics. In the last year, I've participated in two different public forums on Wal-Mart, one defending putting a Supercenter in the next town over and the other as a "responder" to the new anti-Wal-Mart documentary "The High Cost of Low Price." I have posted my remarks on the latter on my website. My apologies for some of the local references there, but the audience was leftist students and local community members.

When I did that forum, however, I wish I'd had access to this paper (PDF) by Jason Furman. (Hat tip to Don Luskin at the Krugman Truth Squad.) Some of this was reported on in a Washington Post op-ed, but the paper has tons more good stuff in it. One item not noted in the op-ed is this:

Wal-Mart is relatively unusual in that it offers health insurance both to full- and part-time employees. By comparison, only 60 percent of firms economywide offer health benefits and only 17 percent of firms offer health benefits to part-time workers. Target, for example, does not offer benefits to people working less than 20 hours per week. Wal-Mart, however, has longer waiting periods for eligibility for benefits than many other firms, 6 months for full-time workers and 24 months for part-time workers.

It never ceases to amaze me how many distortions people have created around Wal-Mart, as well as the level of sheer fear it creates among certain folks, both right and left. Perhaps, much like the BDS ("Bush Derangement Syndrome") coined by Charles Krauthammer, we need a WMDS for those who seem to froth at the mouth at the mere mention of Wal-Mart. If so, let me take credit for first coining "Wal-Mart Derangement Syndrome" as the acute onset of paranoia, irrationality, and/or economic ignorance in otherwise normal people in reaction to any one or more of the policies, the practices, the prices, the products, the aesthetics, if not the very existence, of Wal-Mart.

My long-time friend and partner in Austrian crime (and L&P contributing editor) Pete Boettke has a nice new entry at The Austrian Economists blog. Pete is addressing James Buchanan's contributions to political economy (and runs down a great list of Buchanan aphorisms that generations of grad students have tried to take to heart). Specifically, Pete talks about the varieties of socialism that have been threats to economic and political freedom over the last 100 years. He notes that the 21st century version of socialism has a new twist to it, according to Buchanan:

But Buchanan claims in his essay "Afraid to Be Free: Dependence as Desideratum" that the new threat in the 21st century comes in the form of:

(4) parental socialism --- where the individuals invite the government to meddle in their lives to protect them from themselves and provide security in their lives from the vagaries of a life left to their own making.

That's my emphasis, which is to distinguish this form of socialism, which involves individuals asking to be saved from themselves (parental) from forms where elected leaders or self-appointed elites simply believed they had to save others from themselves (paternal). Pete argues that Buchanan believes parental socialism has arisen because:

Autonomy is losing its appeal. The learned helplessness we have acquired by living in a political culture of preferential treatment and protection from ourselves may have left the modern mind incapable of accepting the responsibilities of freedom. We are instead afraid to be free.

I think there's much truth to this, but I want to take it a step further. It's not just the political culture that creates this demand to be saved from ourselves, but other aspects of the culture as well. In particular, I want to talk about parenting and the family.

Part of the unwillingness and inability of many (especially young) adults to take responsibility for their own lives comes from being raised by parents who protected them from either having to choose (by doing it for them) or accepting responsibility for the outcomes of the choices (by trying to constantly bail them out of situations of their own making). In addition, too many parents operate in a climate of fear, where they will go to extraordinary lengths to ensure that nothing "bad" ever happens to their children. Think of the parents who will only allow their child to play on a playground full of soft rubber equipment and mats so that the horror of a scraped knee or bruised shin will never be experienced. Or consider the way better-off parents have taken quickly to getting children diagnosed with learing disabilities the moment school gets tough or they are unable to live up to parental expectations. Although some such disabilities may be real, it can also be a convenient way of excusing self-responsibility. Consider further the umbilical cord of the cellphone, with so many college students constantly connected to parents - and not because just the parents want that connection, but because the students themselves often cannot make a decision without parental involvement and help. As this wonderful piece from Psychology Today terms it, we're fast becoming "A Nation of Wimps."

Having worked with incoming college students closely for four years, the future scares me. We have too many students arriving at college unprepared for the sorts of decisions they will have to make and for taking responsibility for the results. For example, a group of our students, in the wake of the alcohol-related death of a fellow student, demanded that the university provide a "drunk bus" from campus to the village so that they could drink heavily and not have to worry about getting home. Their argument was that they should be able to do whatever they want and that WE should be making sure it doesn't kill them. This is "parental socialism" at its core.

We also have students who are unprepared for failure, having been cushioned from it for 18 years by parents who believe that any negative outcome for their kids reflects some sort of failure on their part. My own diagnosis of much of this cultural problem is that too many parents want trophy kids and that the over-psychologizing of parenting has frozen parents into mortal fear of doing something "wrong" and damaging kids for life. Think of the vast literature on potty training. Ask people who parented before the 1960s about whether they needed a manual to train their kids, or feared deep psychological damage if they did it "too early" or "wrong." They will, rightly in my view, laugh in your face. (The psychologist-columnist John Rosemond is excellent on this issue and many others, though I don't agree with him on everything. See in particular his Bill of Rights for Children, which captures his approach well.)

I once said to a group of students that the sign of a good parent is that he or she is unafraid to make his or her children cry (e.g. by saying no and sticking to it). They were horrified. For thousands of years, humans made it to adulthood fully functional despite a world much scarier than that of the 21st century. It's a fascinating question why we've invented this culture of "safety" and fear around our children. Perhaps with the demise of real fears (childhood illnesses, widespread grinding poverty in the West, and children being killed while working), we create new ones, in a sort of "dark side" parallel of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. One test of this hypothesis would be whether or not these sorts of parenting practices and views of responsibility are directly correlated with a society's wealth. My own casual empiricism about my own students (both across differences in income within the US and between US students and those coming from poorer regions outside the US) suggests the hypothesis is correct.

And those of us who teach know these kids - they don't know how to react to a poor grade and work to improve it; they take all criticism (from faculty and peers) of their ideas or skills as being personal (or being the result of faculty political bias, rather than consider the possibility that they need to do better); and faced with personal crises, they are frozen into complete inactivity. And they expect their parents to make it all right. Once again, the cultural roots of parental socialism in a nutshell.

I don't consider myself a Randian or an Objectivist of any stripe, but this issue is an example of ol' Ayn being right on the mark in emphasizing the linkages between cultural practices, philosophical ideas, and the political-economic order. I invite, no I urge, Chris to chime in here and make this argument better than I can. It seems to me it's precisely the sorts of things he's talking about in the last few chapters of Total Freedom.

The challenge for those of us who cherish economic and political freedom is enormous. Without changes in the culture, specifically the culture around parenting, it will be increasingly difficult to convince people that a free society is a good society. As Chris and others have said, recognizing the central role of culture in this way inverts a famous feminist slogan; in this analysis, the political is often the personal.

I have always admired him for having the courage of his convictions, for not caring too much what others thought about him, and most of all, for maintaining his sense of humor and optimism about himself and the world around him.

Too many conservatives, and libertarians for that matter, are seen as, and some really are!, humorless or pessimistic (see Robert Bork for example). Reagan convinced many that it was possible to be a happy, optimistic, and funny conservative. That alone was probably responsible for a tremendous shift in the perception of conservativism in the US and the rise of the current generation of baby boom conservatives. He was also a man of ideas. He was much better read than people have given him credit for, and more important, he believed in the power of ideas. That sets him apart from every president since World War II, at least. The combination of idealism and optimism and humor was also important in getting things done despite significant opposition. He was, for better or for worse, a good model of leadership.

I have often used a quote that Reagan kept on his desk, although he didn't write it: "There's no limit to what a man can do or where he can go if he doesn't mind who gets the credit." Another fine model for leadership.

Love him or hate him, he changed the world, and he'll be the last man of ideas to run for president.

Rod has given us a hunk of economics and social analysis to chew on. I am largely in agreement with what he has to say, but I think there are some issues to clarify and expand upon.

Women on the job market make, on average, 75 cents for every dollar men make for the equivalent jobs.

Actually, this is only real problem in the piece.  The famous 75 cents figure is NOT based on "equivalent jobs," rather it's based on the average wage for working women and working men.  It does not take into account the kind of jobs people have, the training and education they have, their family situations, whether they work full-time or part-time, and so forth.  Studies that control for these sorts of variables continually narrow the gender wage gap.  Even just taking age into account changes matters:  the wage gap for men and women in their 20s, not controlling for any other variables, is notably smaller, with women earning over 90 cents on a dollar for men.  Not surprisingly, the gap is largest for older women.  Why "not surprisingly?"  The key is that younger women were more prepared to enter the job market - they are more likely to have college degrees etc..  Older women frequently found themselves employed when they didn't expect to be at a younger age, making it less likely they acquired skills that would make them productive. 

According to the National Longitudinal Study of Youth, in 1968, 28% of white women age 14-24 planned to work at age 35.  In 1980, more than 70% of them were in the labor force.  In 1979, 75% of women age 14-21 planned to work at age 35.  The women who were in that age group in the late 60s found themselves at age 35 and later in the workforce but underskilled.  They are still catching up.  Younger women haven't faced that problem, hence their wage gap is lower.  And note that this was about white women - the wage gap between black women and black men has always been narrower because black women have had higher labor force participation rates and have had greater expectations of working as adults, not to mention the various problems that lead to low wages for black men (war on drugs, crappy public schools, etc.).

Studies that have controlled for all the non-gender factors that might affect wages show much smaller gaps. For example, a late 1990s study by June O'Neill showed that the gap for all people aged 27-33 without children was 2% in 1994. And recent Bureau of Labor Statistics data show the gap was 8% for never-married workers in 1999.  So, the reality here is that a good hunk of the gender wage gap is explained by the differences in labor market characteristics of men and women, everything from human capital to whether or not they are married or have kids.  Bottom line:  two workers in their 20s or 30s identical in every way other than gender will make just about the same wages.  A gap still exists but it is under 10%, and perhaps much smaller.  My point is simply that markets are already doing a pretty good job of eliminating labor market discrimination in the sense of making sure that equally qualified people get paid the same for the same work.

Rod's critique of the neoclassical story of why competition will perfectly eliminate descrimination-based wage gaps is excellent.  An Austrian perspective would emphasize the prospective nature of the value of a worker's marginal product and gladly admit that employers can and do get it wrong.  I heartily recommend the work of W. H. Hutt for a really good Austrian view of labor markets.  Austrians would rely on the "rationality" of markets as processes, not the foresight of individual firms, to explain why there is a tendency for workers to get paid according to what they contribute to production.  And Rod's points about the comparative ability of markets and governments to set wages (both imperfectly, but markets less imperfectly) are right on as well.

Nonetheless, a wage gap remains.  Is that the result of discrimination?  Possibly.  As Rod rightly notes, sexism may be a consumption good to some managers and they are willing to sacrifice profits to be biased against women.  Even recognizing this point doesn't necessarily point to state intervention as the solution.  Why would we expect less sexism among male bureaucrats and politicians, and especially when, absent profit and loss, they lack both signals and incentives to alert them to such behavior and to encourage them to correct it?  It's one thing to say firm managers will see and ignore the unprofitability of sexism, but how likely is gender equality to be when such signals and incentives aren't even there to be seen or ignored?

The wage gap also remains because even if men and women are equally capable of most or all work, cultural norms and expectations affect men and women differently and this has implications for wages.  As Rod nicely puts it:

The fact that the wage gap does not get whittled away by competition in this fashion shows that the gap must be based, so the argument runs, on a real difference in productivity between the sexes. This does not necessarily point to any inherent difference in capacities, but might instead be due to the disproportionate burden of household work shouldered by women -- which would also explain why the wage gap is greater for married women than for single women. (Walter Block makes this argument also.) Hence feminist worries about the wage gap are groundless.

I'm not sure why this argument, if successful, would show that worrying about the wage gap is a mistake, rather than showing that efforts to redress the gap should pay less attention to influencing employers and more attention to influencing marital norms. (Perhaps the response would be that since wives freely choose to abide by such norms, outsiders have no basis for condemning the norms. But since when can't freely chosen arrangements be criticised -- on moral grounds, prudential grounds, or both?)

I could not agree with this more.  Let me phrase it somewhat differently though:  the gender wage gap that exists after human capital etc. is taken into account may reflect discrimination/sexism but that discrimination is not the fault of labor markets.  For example, if it is women who are expected to raise the children or do a disproportionate share of the household labor, this will make them less productive in the labor market, leading to lower wages.  (They will more likely want part-time work, or jobs with scheduling flexibility, both of which tend to pay less, ceteris paribus.  They will also be more likely to interrupt their consecutive years at a specific job or in the labor force generally, both of which, ceteris paribus, lower earnings.)  The problem here is that the sexism is occuring "before" people get to the labor market:  in the distribution of household production or in educational processes or more generally in cultural expectations of men and women.  Markets may reasonably accurately reflect productivity, but other sexist social processes produce differences in productivity that lead to wage differentials.  For me, it's perfectly possible to argue both that markets will reduce discrimination much better than the state or other systems and that sexism still causes women to get paid less than men, all else equal.  As a libertarian, one can, as Rod says, criticize the voluntary choices of individuals, especially when one thinks they lead to pernicious social consequences. 

And I also am in deep agreement with this point of Rod's:

That's one reason I'm more sympathetic to the labour movement and the feminist movement than many libertarians nowadays tend to be. In the 19th century, libertarians saw political oppression as one component in an interlocking system of political, economic, and cultural factors; they made neither the mistake of thinking that political power was the only problem nor the mistake of thinking that political power could be safely and effectively used to combat the other problems.

One of the things I talk about when I teach this material is that if women (and men!) want to continue to narrow that wage gap, they need to, as it were, get their own houses in order.  When the burden of household production is more equally shared between men and women, the gap between their wages will fall as well.  Obviously, neither Rod nor I am recommending state-sponsored re-education camps for lazy men, but there are all kinds of non-coercive ways to convince people to change their behaviors, and to call upon moral norms of fairness and equality in doing so. 

Will the gender wage gap ever be eliminated totally?  Maybe not, but as libertarians, we can do more than just say "well, markets eliminate any 'real' discrmination" and be done with it.  It's about both liberty AND power (duh!).  We can be part of social movements that work for equality in the home and workplace (power) as well as under the law (liberty).

I'm in the midst of re-reading Hayek's The Road to Serfdom for a roundtable discussion at the History of Economics Society meetings next weekend. What a wonderful, prescient book. It's also very interesting to see, as Hayek notes in his introduction to the 1976 edition, how much that was in there foreshadowed later work he engaged in. The chapter "Why the Worst Get on Top" has always been one of my favorites, and it remains so after re-reading it. Given the recent events in Iraqi prisons by both Saddammites and the US military, I couldn't help but note this passage (pp. 150-1), which I reprint here:

But where a few specific ends dominate the whole of society [e.g., the War on Terror or a cult of personality - SH], it is inevitable that occasionally cruelty may become a duty; that acts which revolt all our feeling, such as the shooting of hostages or the killing of the old or sick, should be treated as mere matters of expediency; that the compulsory uprooting and transportation of hundreds of thousand should be come an instrument of policy approved by almost everybody except the victims.... There is always in the eyes of the collectivist a greater goal which these acts serve and which to him justifies them because the pursuit of the common end of society can know no limits in any rights or values of any individual. ....

There will be jobs to be done about the badness of which taken by themselves nobody has any doubt, but which have to be done in the service of some higher end, and which have to be executed with the same expertness and efficiency as any others. And as there will be need for actions which are bad in themselves, and which all those still influenced by traditional morals will be reluctant to perform, the readiness to do bad things becomes a path to promotion and power.

The chapter on "The End of Truth" also is well worth reading in light of the War on Terror.

At the risk of being a one-note Charlie, here's the single best thing I've read yet on the bias in academia question, by Tim Burke (hat tip to Ralph Luker at Cliopatria). Money quote number one:

On the other hand, collegiality is a powerful cultural force in many colleges and universities, and its stultifying or comforting effects (take your pick) often have nothing to do with politics in any sense. A conservative or libertarian who is a mensch about his or her views and research may well be admired, even beloved, by liberal or left colleagues, and fondly regarded as valuable because of their views. On the other hand, someone like Daniel Pipes who is running around picking broad-brush fights with everyone whom he perceives as a bad academic, usually based on a paper-thin reading of their syllabi or even just the titles of their research, is going to be loathed, but as much for his behavior as his political views. A liberal or leftist who plays Stalinist Truth Squad in the same way is going to be equally loathed and avoided.

Money quote number two:

12. Kieran Healy rightfully observes that conservatives talking about this issue are making an interesting exception to their general tendency among conservatives to assume that results in the market are probably based on some real distribution of qualifications rather than bias or discrimination. It might be fair to assert in response that academic hiring is a closed or non-market system, and this is precisely what is unfair about it. But if so, it requires that one demonstrate that there is a class of potential, qualified individuals who are being discriminated against at the time of hiring, or that these individuals are being discriminatorily weeded out at the time of initial acceptance for training. If not, then the argument that conservatives are being discriminated against in academic hiring practices is exactly comparable in its logics and evidence to the logic of most affirmative action programs and many other antidiscrimination initiatives, that there is a subtle systemic bias which is producing unequal results that prevents a “normal” sociological distribution of candidates in particular jobs. It behooves conservatives who want to claim this to either concretely explain why this argument only applies to conservatives in academia, or to repudiate the standard conservative argument against affirmative action and other public-policy programs designed to deal with subtle bias effects.

13. On the other hand, most of the people mocking or disagreeing with the claim that conservatives are treated poorly in academia seem to me to be equally at odds with many standard representations of bias effects that are widely accepted by liberals or leftists, namely, that bias is often subtle, discursive, and institutionally pervasive, and that “hostile environments” can exist where no single action or statement, or any concrete form of discrimination can be easily pointed to as a smoking gun. Most of those claiming a bias against conservatives in academia are pointing to exactly these kinds of hostile-environment incidents and moments, and seeing them as causing the same kinds of psychological and inhibitory harms that this type of discrimination is said to cause in other contexts. I accept that people edging away from you in an elevator is a type of bias-effect that is harmful—an often cited instance of the kinds of subtly pervasive discrimination that African-Americans may suffer from in mostly-white institutions. I’ve never experienced myself because I’m white, and had I not read of it in the personal, anecdotal accounts of many African-Americans, I truthfully would never have noticed it. Same here. I don’t understand why it is so hard to accept that self-identified conservative undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty report experiencing many similar forms of pervasive, subtle bias. What I'm seeing from many of those who dismiss these claims is a collective eye-rolling, a sort of "big deal, so your professor sneered at you, get over it". And yet few of those doing that eye-rolling would say the same to a student of color or a woman reporting similar experiences. The grounds on which many critics are doubting that such bias exists would have to, in all honesty, extend to all anecdotal, experiential or narrative claims of bias. The only way to salvage such claims would be if they could be profitably correlated with quantifiable evidence of discrimination—but in this case, we have some evidence to that effect. The only other way to salvage this point is to say, "It's wrong to be biased against people because of their race, gender or sexual orientation, but not because of their politics". A few seem willing to say just that: I can only say I think that's a big, fat mistake on a great many fronts.

All I can say is "I wish I'd written this."

I want to weigh in with some thoughts about the whole National Guard documents/CBS forgery issue. This story has consumed me for the last two days. I'm far less interested in the whole question of what Bush and/or Kerry did or didn't do during the Vietnam Era than I am about what this particular incident has to say about liberty and power. I'm also assuming that everyone has some cursory knowledge of the whole issue. If not, the best places to go for summaries are Instapundit or Powerline. Let me also say that I am completely convinced that these documents, or at least 2 of them, are forgeries. If I'm wrong, this little essay's going to look pretty stupid, but I'm willing to take that chance. Let me also say that it doesn't matter to me where they came from and how they got to CBS. What I care about is how these memos got on the air and what the near-instant demolition of them by the blogs and "new media" means socially. And as I've argued before in this space, I have no love for the incumbent, so my point is not to destroy Kerry or support Bush. Finally, people will call this "blogosphere triumphalism" but so be it.

With that said, it seems to me that this incident is a triumph of liberty over power. For years, we've heard from both Right and Left that the "Big Media" are a problem. Each group thinks they are the handmaiden of the other group. What both appear to agree on is that they are near-all powerful entities who are growing unchecked like some electromagnetic cancer upon the land. The Left has long had the small alternative press, which tried to counter the power of the Big Guys, but with limited success, and it had academia. The Right, since the 80s anyway, has had the think-tank world (which I've always viewed as the alternative university for libertarians and conservatives who perceived themselves, perhaps wrongly, as being closed out of academic by what they saw as leftist power). However it had no real media of its own (Jim and Tammy Faye don't count) until the advent of the Internet. There's a reason the earliest and most well-known blogs lean conservative or libertarian: there was a latent demand for their services.

The net finally reduced the cost of publishing to near zero, at least on the margin, and radically democratized the knowledge production industry, especially investigative reporting. By eliminating both political (think broadcast licenses) barriers to entry and the huge start up costs of publishing, the Internet widened the sphere of liberty for those who wished to be producers of information. The result, as we've seen so clearly the last 48 hours, is that the strength of Big Media power has been radically reduced. Average Americans, with their knowledge of typewriters, military procedure, or fairly obscure terms like "kerning," were able to compete with, and effectively neutralize, one of the most powerful organizations on the planet. The Internet has demonstrated itself to be one of the most powerful (yes, powerful), power-checking institutions ever. By opening up the lines of communication to nearly everyone, it has forced us to rely on actual arguments, facts, history, and evidence precisely because the intensity of competition and the value of reputation is so high. The work that was done in demonstrating, at least to my satisfaction, the forging of those documents is a tribute to the power of truth that comes from liberty. There's no "trust me, I'm <Dan Rather, Peter Jennings, Walter Cronkite>", rather you're only as good as your arguments and evidence and your experts (and the persuasiveness of the latter can also be determined with a quick Google search).

None of this should be surprising to those of us raised on Hayek. After all, this is nothing more than the intellectual version of "Competition as a Discovery Procedure." Or better yet, it is Michael Polanyi's work on "The Republic of Science" transferred to current events. Even in the blogosphere, the commentary has talked about the "distributed intelligence" of the Net, or "open source journalism," or even the "hive mind" (a bit too Borg-ish for my taste, but it makes the point). The Hayekian lesson is that it is through the ability to enter the market and compete that knowledge gets created and made socially available to others. Just as in economic competition, where the process will tend to allocate resources better than alternative processes, so in the competition to produce news does the process tend to produce the best approximation to "truth." Markets are in that way examples of liberty defeating power. The very openness and competitiveness of markets makes any momentary hold on power tenuous, requiring that those who possess it continually act affirmatively (e.g. innovating, serving consumers well) to keep it. CBS and other Big Media simply have never had to face this sort of environment before and have become sloppy as a result.

I should add here one or two comments on how this all might have happened. I don't believe that CBS or others exhibit deliberate, conscious bias against conservatives. I don't believe (although it could be true) that Dan Rather said "I need to destroy Bush, so I'll take shortcuts to try to do so." Instead, as others have argued, the problem is more bias-induced laziness. Assuming CBS was duped and not complicit, I'm sure they saw these memos as fitting their priors about Bush and political issues more generally and simply didn't see any reason to investigate further because the memos, in some sense, just had to be true. All the head-scratching about why it took 12 hours for the blogosphere to see the obviously shoddy forging job while CBS missed it can be explained by the differences in behavior induced by both different political priors and the differening perceptions of the rules of the game held by bloggers and Big Media. Political priors will frame what sorts of things require "investigation" and what sorts do not. The competition generated by the advent of the Internet has widened the range of things deemed to be worthy of investigation (on all sides: think of the ways in which blogs have attempted to undermine the case for the War in Iraq). In addition, when one sees oneself in an environment of competition, as bloggers do, one cannot afford to be lazy and everyone has to start checking their premises. This is not, as this recent piece argued, an attempt to police people's politics. Rather it is competition doing what it does best: holding everyone accountable to the "constitutional rules" of the Republic of Science. And as good Hayekians know, when the rules are right and access is open, the truth will out.

Finally, I appeal to my friends on the Left to take the right lesson from this whole event. Again, this is a triumph of democracy, liberty, and the common person over some of the most powerful institutions in America. That aspect of this event, again assuming the memos are forged, should be cause for celebration on the Left. It's possible that this could further doom the Kerry campaign, but don't let that obscure the sunshine. To all who argue that monopolized unchecked corporate power is a problem, the outing of CBS, and the advent of the new media on the Internet more generally, should be a cause for celebration. More power to the people and all of that. The way in which competition takes advantage of distributed knowledge and mobilizes it through the rules and procedures of the competitive process is the key to toppling power, whether economic, political, or intellectual. It works in markets just as well as it works in the world of the new media. I'm sorry if you don't like the particulars, but if you call yourself a person of the Left, this is a moment you should have been waiting for. Orwell just got that whole technology and power thing ass-backwards. The democratization of knowledge production and the ability of one person with a computer to check the power of the major social institutions is here, and it is the technology of the telescreen that brought it to us.

Left, Right, Libertarian, or whatever, liberty has once again defeated power by redestributing it back to the people.