Considering freedom

Via Bookworm Room, Richard Disney showcases a 1948 cartoon which educates against "ISM." (That would be the snake oil -isms peddled by those utopians who promise great things in exchange for freedom.) The video is between nine and ten minutes long.

Over at the New York Times, Jeffrey Rosen provides a review of the new book Freedom for the Thought That We Hate: A Biography of the First Amendment by Anthony Lewis.

If you didn't follow the link the other day in the Thermostat Policing post, I'd like to highlight the end of Don Boudreaux's Rampaging Regulators post:

I quote again the final lines of Thomas Sowell's greatest book: Knowledge and Decisions:

[Freedom] is, above all, the right of ordinary people to find elbow room for themselves and a refuge from the rampaging presumptions of their "betters."

The link inside the above quote takes you to a May 2004 Cafe Hayek post, which has the quote coupled with the sentence which leads into it:

Freedom is not simply the right of intellectuals to circulate their merchandise. It is, above all, the right of ordinary people to find elbow room for themselves and a refuge from the rampaging presumptions of their “betters.”

Hear! Hear!

BTW: Boudreaux has a follow up post to Rampaging Regulators.