Virtual community, real debate.

• Author: Gillespie, Nick

One of the aims of reason is to act as a virtual community for libertarians, to provide a place where people interested in "Free Minds and Free Markets" can come together not just for news and analysis but also to hash out differences of opinion. So we're especially excited to bring you this month's cover story, a debate dedicated to "Rethinking the Social Responsibility of Business" featuring Nobel laureate Milton Friedman and CEOs John Mackey of Whole Foods Markets and T.J. Rodgers of Cypress Semiconductor (see page 28).

Mackey, whose stores have transformed grocery shopping from a grim, necessary evil into a multisensory delight, takes issue with Friedman's famous dictum that business has "one and only one social responsibility": "to increase its profits." Mackey argues that "both capitalism and corporations are misunderstood, mistrusted, and disliked around the world because of statements like Friedman's on social responsibility."

Ill place of an exclusive focus on profits and shareholders, he sketches a new vision of the social responsibility of business, one that includes customers, employees, and other stakeholders. Friedman and Rodgers--who became a hero to all Catholic school alumni a few years back when he publicly took on a grandstanding, poorly informed nun who questioned his firm's hiring practices respond in spirited and pointed prose. The result is an exchange as rich and filling as the surprisingly good vegan chocolate cake sold at Whole Foods.

The rest of this issue serves up other tasty morsels. Associate Editor Matt Welch explains the weird liberal love affair with eminent domain (page 18); in "The Second Romanian...