FROM THE ARCHIVES.

20 YEARS AGO

August/September 1998

"Employers should have every right to restrict speech, forbid the display of pictures, or limit dating on the job. But when the state and the courts impose these rules, which businesses adopt 'voluntarily' to avert legal action, that's a different matter."

CATHY YOUNG

"Groping Toward Sanity"

"Effectively the right is arguing what it has always argued: Suffer this and the world will come undone. 'This' has been the vote for women, access to high culture for those without educations, admission to law schools and medical schools for 'outsiders.' 'This' was always made to seem the last defense of civilization, the innovation that would send the world into a downward spiral from which recovery was impossible. And... nothing happened."

GRANT MCCRACKEN

"The Politics of Plenitude"

"Time is the real currency of life, and the value of our time--what we can acquire for its exchange--is our most important asset."

W. MICHAEL COX AND RICHARD G. ALM

"Buying Time"

35 YEARS AGO

September 1983

"The more-progressive bureaucrats of the 70s, however, argued that a bit more freedom should go into the next orgy of gasoline rationing. Everyone would still be issued coupons, each with a fixed quota of weekly gasoline attached. But... these would be negotiable and saleable in a legal 'white market.' If the coupon entitled you to, say, 20 gallons a week, you could buy one or more coupons from fellow citizens at whatever price would be set by the interplay of supply and demand. And so a little bit of freedom was to be permitted within the matrix of a rotten situation. The scheme must have been dreamed up by some economist. Me, I prefer the old-style black market. It is freer and basically more honest, if (alas) illegal."

MURRAY N. ROTHBARD

"Coupon Caper"

"The opponents of advertising are puritans, tormented by the distressing thought that someone, somewhere, might be happy. They condemn the masses' tastes as shoddy, their values as ugly, their pleasures as trivial, and their enjoyment of earthy, concrete things as materialistic. They are terrifyingly confident in the privileged status of their own tastes and see nothing amiss in imposing these upon their fellows."

JOHN K. WILLIAMS

"And Now, a Pitch for Advertising"

"I interviewed one grower who, to comply with the [Agricultural Labor Relations Act] requirement that he provide the union with a list of all his employees along with their current home addresses and phone numbers, had...