Editor's Note.

• Author: Postrel, Virginia
• Position: Nick Gillespie to become editor of Reason magazine - Brief Article - Editorial

When I was in college, I wanted to be editor of REASON when I grew up. It was an impractical ambition, especially since the magazine was located in Santa Barbara, way off any journalist's normal career path. So, being the practical product of the economically stressful 1970s, I became a business journalist, working for The Wall Street Journal and Inc.

Then, through an amazing coincidence, my husband got a job in Los Angeles just as REASON moved here in 1986.1 went to work at the magazine, and in July 1989 I got my wish.

Four months later, the Berlin Wall fell, and nothing in political life has been the same since. It has been a fascinating decade, and REASON has been on the cutting edge of many of its most important stories.

In 1990 alone, REASON delved into the ideology of the resurgent green movement, ran the first national article on the excesses of the anti-date-rape crusade on college campuses, and exposed the ACLU's dwindling interest in free speech, helping to turn that organization around.

Our January 1991 cover story explored the threat of Internet regulation, explaining what the Net was and why it mattered.

Through the 1990s, REASON was a voice of "dissident feminism," upholding the equal dignity of both sexes and supporting the rights of individuals against a government that had gone mad over sexual harassment. We opposed the expansion of law enforcement powers during the Bush and Clinton administrations. By the end of the decade, Waco and Monica had drawn many Americans to our side.

Back then, the political classes were pushing a plethora of schemes--to manage high-tech businesses with industrial policy, to stop corporate restructuring, to block immigration, to nationalize health insurance--that would have made today's prosperity impossible. By December 1995, those schemes had mostly failed, and we could run...