The Free Agent once worked at a publication she will pseudoname Hippy Week. Oh, how happy she was there, how her duties suited her, and how she enjoyed her intelligent, energetic, and humorous coworkers. But while they tolerated her politics—they could accept any position as long as it was perceived to be on the lunatic […]
Most-Merciful Profit Read More »
The Free Agent is in the mood for something a little more comedic than her columns of late. A coworker (who spent the first thirty years of her life in communist Poland) told her about the following situation and her assessment of it, and FA relayed the anecdote to a Democrat friend of hers. The
A Libertarian, a Communist, and a Democrat Walk into a Bar… Read More »
The Free Agent is still trying to understand her demonification on the web. After all, if someone who just wants to provide for herself and isn’t asking anything of you is your enemy, you’ve got a lot of enemies. She was able to sort the invective into three categories, the first two, arguments ad hominum,
The wound of the last night’s victory of Magic Wand politics is too fresh to discuss, so The Free Agent will instead encourage the use of the word political in general. She means that to substitute for words like socialized, universal, and especially, government. In The Free Agent’s circle, the adjective government is understood to
The Word is Political Read More »
As of today, 83,904 Americans are waiting for a kidney transplant, the oldest and most cost-effective organ transplant surgery, according to the United Network for Organ Sharing, which comprises data from all transplant programs in the country. In 2006, there were 18,052 kidney transplant operations performed, and while that figure has been trending up from
A Kidney in Every Pot Read More »
The Free Agent has been mulling over the elegant parable offered by M. Frederic Bastiat in “That Which is Seen and That which is Not Seen” in opposition to pointless destruction (and brilliantly, to trade barriers, “nothing else than a partial destruction”). The story is this: A shopkeeper’s son carelessly breaks a pane of glass,
Pardonnez-moi, Monsieur Bastiat Read More »
Do you support gay marriage? The knee-jerk libertarian answer, “why do we authorize the state to recognize or withhold recognition for personal relationships?” while true, doesn’t really advance the conversation. A more thoughtful response is to ask what is this “marriage” fuss is about anyway? After all, anyone can call themselves married, you can call
Is Gay Marriage About Homosexuality? Read More »
Throughout The Free Agent’s career, she has fascinated youthful admirers with her stories about the olden days, i.e., the 1970s. (Extremely precocious, she was able to absorb and analyze current events even as she changed her own diapers.) She is reminded of that unfortunate era by recent events like increased money supply beyond economic growth
Gather ‘Round, Young’uns Read More »
The infamous Christopher Guest-produced ad for this year’s census, featuring a stable of his favorite actors, debuted during the Super Bowl at a cost of $2.5 million, and packages the 2010 census as kind of a big national family reunion. A census for the Facebook age. Fortunately, it’s also a census for the twitter age,
Curse You, Ed Begley, Jr! Read More »
A gentleman of The Free Agent’s acquaintance posted a comment on Facebook recently to the effect that he’d sooner trust Congress to provide his health insurance than the “greedy” insurance companies “now prowling the halls of the Capital office buildings”. This is not the first time I’ve heard this argument, that trust is required somehow