Harper's Magazine

There is an undeniable beauty to laissez-faire theory, with its promise that by struggling against one another, by grasping and elbowing and shouting and shoving, we create efficiency and satisfaction and progress for all. This concept has shaped, at the most fundamental levels, how we understand and engineer our basic freedoms -- economic, political, and moral. Until recently, however, most politicians and economists accepted that freedom within the marketplace had to be limited, at least to some degree, by… more

After months of intensifying violence, a looming Sunni boycott, and numerous calls for postponement, Iraq's elections took place as scheduled on January 30 and were immediately hailed as a resounding success. A total of 8.5 million Iraqis, under literal threat of decapitation, cast their ballots at some 5,300 polling centers across the country. Turnout reached 58 percent nationally, surpassing 90 percent in certain Shiite- and Kurd-dominated neighborhoods, and bloodshed was relatively minimal, with forty-four Iraqis killed during the… more

As medication becomes a way of life for more and more Americans, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has been remodeled to fit the times. Of the 296 drugs the FDA has approved in the last decade, most have been lifestyle drugs, or copycats of already existing medicines, or both. There have been multiple obesity treatments, allergy medicines, hair-loss cures, impotence pills, and drugs for the newest "disease," irritable bowel syndrome. Despite offering consumers few additional health… more

That serious problems plague our new, computerized voting machines -- on which 29 percent of U.S. voters are poised to cast their votes in November -- has been apparent ever since $3.9 billion in federal funding for the machines was made available in 2002, in the aftermath of Bush v. Gore. In the years since, report after report has cautioned that the machines lack the security and robustness necessary to withstand the assaults of hackers or unscrupulous technicians. But… more

In 1996, Robert Wojtowicz, the literary executor of Lewis Mumford (1895-1990) and a professor of art history at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, published a useful overview of Mumford's life and work, Lewis Mumford and American Modernism: Eutopian Themes for Architecture and Urban Planning. Now Wojtowicz has collected a number of… more