From the archives.

20 YEARS AGO March 1997

"Just as anti-gay conservatives are far more threatened by stable, bourgeois same-sex couples (who want to get married!) than by anonymous bathhouse sex or exhibitionists parading in leather jock straps, nothing would undermine the official line on drugs more than lots of respectable, otherwise law-abiding people admitting that they smoke marijuana without ruining their lives."

VIRGINIA POSTREL

"Reefer Madness"

"The trick, of course, is that doing nothing in the public policy world allows much more to be done in the real world."

THOMAS W. HAZLETT

"Stayin' Alive"

"Shakespeare made us see the business company as like a theater company, a troupe of actors, whose interactions generate the plot of the play and the interest that draws the paying audience; he taught us practically how life with others is not necessarily a zero-sum game but an arena where all may profit and competition increases the payoffs for everyone."

FREDERICK TURNER

"The Merchant of Avon"

30 YEARS AGO March 1987

"The criminalization of insider trading defies rational explanation. If using 'inside' information-knowledge not available to the general investing public--is a crime, then who are its victims?"

GLEN FEIGHERY

"In Defense of Traders, Raiders, and Arbs"

"Britain's Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher is trying hard to take a few percentage points off the lowest (yes, lowest) rate of 29 percent. She's got plenty of incentive: 95 percent of British taxpayers fall into that bracket."

"Lite Taxes: America's Contribution to the World's New Taste"

40 YEARS AGO March 1977

"The outgoing Ford administration issued a policy statement on Federal strategy for drug abuse prevention that, for the first time, questioned the use of criminal penalties for marijuana possession."

"Easing Drug Laws"

"It is a regrettable but undeniable fact that economics, more than other scientific disciplines, is liable to recurrent fashions and fads, the periodic reintrusion into professional discussion of popular superstitions which earlier generations of economists had successfully driven back into the circles of cranks and demagogues."

F.A. HAYEK

"'Planning' Our Way to Serfdom"

"Any form of revenue sharing is, of course, an outrageous fraud. The Federal...