In the non-linear, fuzzy-logic, imperfect world I inhabit, it's very nervous-making when folks make absolutist statements about anything -- including the way the world works. So I feel there's a kind of heartening but adolescent simplicity in Murray's cri de coeur: would that things really were that easy. At the meta level, anyone, whether from the Right or Left, making the claim that if we all just believed X, then all problems would be solved -- is bound to be too caught up in needing to squish facts through his/her cognitive template to see things in all their messy it-aint-necessarily-so complexity. So I can agree with Murray that it would be good to decriminalize recreational drug-use and am all in favor of getting landlords to clean up their crack-houses -- but disagree with the need to buy into his entire fundamentalist package. In particular, Murray's one-to-one-correlation between economic and other kinds of freedom seems reductive at best (for example, how does Singapore fit into his model, where there is more economic freedom than any other kind?) and pernicious at worst: as always in these discussions, I am reminded of Yeats' "The Second Coming", where the best lack all conviction and the worst are full of passionate intensity. Just to address one of those more troublesome bits of missing complexity, while I agree that economics often underlies much of what goes in in human affairs, it doesn't underlie everything. People want and do and strive and create and squabble often for reasons that have nothing to do with economic motivators: witness that MFA programs have proliferated as widely as MBA programs; witness Bosnia (and the student activists, with their wit and courage). Economic freedom as Prime Mover in these and a kazillion other situations is simplistic, off-point and not generative.