At Discourse, Robert Tracinski reviews my new book Freedom's Furies. Excerpt:
What is perhaps more remarkable from today’s perspective is that these women came up through the world of art and literature. Similarly, H.L. Mencken and Henry Hazlitt—the latter was a leading free-marketer of the time and a friend of the trio; he and Mencken would be fused into the crusading pro-liberty columnist Austen Heller in The Fountainhead—were both editors of the American Mercury. This was one of the prominent right-wing publications of the early 20th century but also one of its leading literary journals. Paterson was a key figure covering the book publishing scene in New York City, while Ayn Rand started out as a scriptwriter in Hollywood and later hobnobbed with studio executives and movie stars. These people were what you might call “coastal elites”—yet they argued for laissez-faire economics, promoted individualism and fought against the left.;
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