Media and Culture

How is capitalism being treated in American popular culture today? The signals are mixed, but generally the picture is bleak.

The Clinton administration, applying its theory that all good things should be subsidized with tax dollars, proposes new spending to upgrade the Internet. But it's not the government that has turned this medium into the most promising venue for free-market exchange in our time. It's the astounding power of market commerce itself.

A Jewish Batman? A female Robin? The Dynamic Duo battling on behalf of truth, justice, and Austrian economics? Are we in a parallel universe or what? We are indeed if we are reading The Batman Chronicles, the Winter 1998 issue, devoted to "Elseworlds," in which "heroes are taken from their usual settings and put into strange times and places."

Those who say gifts are inefficient forget the utility of the giver. 

The new QJAE asks: in what ways are they alike?

Like Martha Nussbaum, whose Cultivating Humanity is addressed above, John M. Ellis is concerned with multiculturalism.

In a state-funded education system, bad ideas live longer than they would in a free market. That's the best explanation for the staying power of the two opposing errors of our time: nihilism and pseudo-omniscience in the social sciences.

Extremes like bloody backs distract from the main issue, which is not whether taxpayers should subsidize grotesque performance or perverse photography, but whether they should subsidize art at all. Market theory, of course, follows one simple rule: those who want something should be the ones to pay for it. In particular, those who want art, or a specific kind of art, should put up the money, whether by purchasing tickets or becoming a generous benefactor.

Eugene Genovese is a Marxist historian, but he is a Marxist of a most unusual kind. In this excellent collection of essays, he continually advocates conservative views, often expressed more trenchantly than is customary among rightists themselves