At a Palo Alto, California, record store in September 1975, the latest issue of Rolling Stone caught the eye of local high school student Charles L. Ponce de Leon. Rock band the Eagles gazed out from the cover in youthful, long-haired glory. Inside was a story by Cameron Crowe, himself only 18 at the time.

De Leon bought the issue, sparking a lasting fascination with Rolling Stone that eventually culminated in his recent book about the magazine’s first two decades. According to de Leon, a cultural historian, writing Rolling Stone and the Rise of Hip Capitalism was “an opportunity to go back in time and think about my own intellectual development.”

It was also an opportunity to assess the magazine’s influence on American culture in the decades following the sexual revolution. “Hip capitalism” was originally coined as a slur for people profiting from the counterculture. In de Leon’s telling, however, it describes how businesses such as Rolling Stone, health food stores, head shops, and others carried 1960s values into mainstream America.

For my money, his argument does not go far enough. Rolling Stone is a perfect example of how entrepreneurs enrich themselves by enriching the lives of consumers. Unfortunately, the magazine’s left-leaning editorial stance rarely acknowledged that reality.

More than personalities or anecdotes, de Leon’s story focuses on the magazine’s content. There is more detail on individual writers, articles, and editorial coverage than some readers will want. Still, he makes a compelling case for how, to quote the book’s subtitle, “a magazine born in the 1960s changed America.”

The story begins on October 17, 1967, when the first issue of Rolling Stone went to press. Its founder, Jann Wenner, was a 21-year-old University of California, Berkeley, dropout. Like many of his peers, he was into marijuana and music. But he was also passionate about journalism. With help from his mentor, Ralph J. Gleason, who had hired him as a reporter for the San Francisco publication Sunday Ramparts, Wenner decided to try his hand at entrepreneurship. Inspired by Billboard, the British weekly Melody Maker, and low-budget fanzines such as Crawdaddy!, Wenner saw an opening for a new publication.

“It would be more discriminating than Billboard,” de Leon writes, “more substantive than the teen magazines or mainstream newspapers, and more lively than Crawdaddy!”

Wenner wanted to use journalism to legitimize the counterculture and its music. But like any entrepreneur, he first had to marshal economic resources. He raised $7,500 through a letter-writing campaign, created a mock-up, and began selling advertising.

The Entrepreneur Who Sold the Counterculture

Building Rolling Stone from the ground up, Wenner was an entrepreneur in the fullest Austrian sense. He identified a niche where his own passions intersected with unmet consumer demand. For all the disdain many young people in the 1960s expressed toward “square” America, the nation’s prosperity had given them more purchasing power than previous generations. They exercised that consumer sovereignty by buying everything from transistor radios to Beatles hair spray.

Soon they were buying Rolling Stone. By 1970, paid circulation had climbed to nearly 200,000. The magazine combined growing professionalism with fierce editorial independence. Its reviewers were unafraid to criticize work they disliked, even by revered artists such as Bob Dylan and Led Zeppelin. The coverage felt authentic, and readers responded.

Writers such as Hunter S. Thompson and Tom Wolfe soon joined the masthead. They were pioneers of “New Journalism,” which broke with the detached, objective style that had long dominated the profession. Thompson’s now-classic Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas first appeared in Rolling Stone in 1971. Wolfe’s 1972 article on the final Apollo lunar mission became the foundation for his later book—and the eventual film—The Right Stuff.

With work like this, Wenner expanded Rolling Stone beyond music into culture, politics, and crime through long-form coverage such as its reporting on the Manson murders. Circulation reached 466,000 by 1976. The following year, Wenner relocated the magazine’s headquarters from San Francisco to New York City, still the journalistic capital of the nation.

The 1980s brought cultural change and a new president, Ronald Reagan. Rolling Stone continued to evolve. A redesign transformed it into a traditional glossy magazine. Coverage expanded to include personal computers and even video games. Music coverage was briefly deemphasized before readers made their dissatisfaction known. Entrepreneurship is a continual negotiation between entrepreneurs and consumers, and consumers always hold the stronger hand. A business must continually earn their loyalty or be displaced by one that will.

One thing that did not change was Rolling Stone‘s politics. From the beginning, both the magazine and Wenner leaned reliably left. Even so, Wenner made one notable concession to the more conservative climate of the 1980s by hiring libertarian humorist P. J. O’Rourke as a writer and editor. A former dope-smoking longhair turned necktie-wearing Reaganite, O’Rourke was, in many ways, the Republican answer to Hunter S. Thompson. He quickly became one of the magazine’s most popular voices.

O’Rourke and Wenner also became friends. In the acknowledgments to All the Trouble in the World, O’Rourke thanked Wenner for allowing him “the latitude to rave and vociferate, although he disagrees with almost all my opinions.” He then vowed to make a Republican of Wenner yet.

That never happened. But their friendship speaks well of Wenner’s openness to dissenting viewpoints. Perhaps he even recognized that his own career embodied many of the entrepreneurial principles O’Rourke admired. Either way, theirs was the kind of friendship — like that of Antonin Scalia and Ruth Bader Ginsburg — that feels increasingly rare today. 

Capitalism, Culture, and Consequence

De Leon’s story of Rolling Stone ends with the publication’s twentieth anniversary in 1987. By that point, issues often ran over 100 pages, and paid circulation had surpassed 1.1 million.

The magazine’s story, of course, continued into the twenty-first century. But it became one of decline, and not only because of the usual challenges facing legacy print media. In 2014, more concerned with aligning itself with the cultural establishment than with getting the story right, the publication botched a now-discredited report of gang rape involving members of a University of Virginia fraternity. With that, Rolling Stone became “what it once claimed to abhor,” according to writer Mark Judge.

De Leon does not cover this episode. But in the epilogue, he does go somewhat starry-eyed for the sexual revolution values Rolling Stone helped mainstream. He connects capitalism to the ongoing victory of those values, a process he sees continuing until conservatives are left with “little recourse but to impose their increasingly unpopular social agenda through antimajoritarian and even authoritarian means.”

Some would argue that the political left is itself quite adept at such means. But de Leon gets this much correct: capitalism, rightly understood, can transcend politics. The progressive ownership of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream has as much right to earn a profit by appealing to consumers as the conservative ownership of Hobby Lobby does.

Rolling Stone is an example of the grassroots power of capitalism. It could not have emerged in an economy without individual initiative, private property, and free markets. And it made Wenner — who sold his remaining ownership stake in 2020 — considerably wealthy, powerful, and professionally successful.

Now 80, Wenner’s life has included plenty of faults. But in the end, the value he brought to the American economic table was both journalistic and entrepreneurial. And, as with free markets themselves, millions benefited from it.

The post <em>Citizen Vigilante</em> and the folly of censorship appeared first on spiked.

The American bald eagle--our nation's national bird and symbol--is doing well. Populations have been expanding for years, and are now approaching the levels estimated for the founding era.

Many policymakers, pundits and professional environmentalists want to credit the Endangered Species Act for the success of eagle recovery efforts. But try as they might, it is hard to find much evidence that the ESA (as opposed to other conservation laws and recovery efforts) did much good, for reasons I explain in the latest issue of PERC Reports, published by the Property & Environment Research Center in Bozeman, MT.

The biggest factor in the eagle's recovery was almost certainly the banning of DDT for most uses. But this was done prior to the enactment of the ESA, under a different law (and by the EPA, not the Fish & Wildlife Service, the latter of which administers the ESA). The eagle also received more targeted protection from other laws. The bald eagle was officially removed from the endangered species list in 2007, and since then populations have continued to soar without the ESA's protection.

There's more, but those are reasons to read the article. It concludes:

Americans should be pleased that bald eagle populations continue to expand. The growing number of bald eagles is a conservation success story. But given the act's longstanding and widespread record of failing to promote species recovery, we should be careful before attributing that success to the Endangered Species Act.

[ And, yes, for those curious, I took the picture that accompanies this post.]

The post The American Bald Eagle Is Back - But Don't Credit the Endangered Species Act appeared first on Reason.com.

Beneath the period costumes, powdered wigs, and tricorn hats, 1776 is a magnificent depiction of open debate. Set during the Second Continental Congress, the musical revolves around Founding Father John Adams and his pursuit of independence. The state delegates argue, compromise, and persuade, reminding us that the birth of America depended on John Stuart Mill's marketplace of ideas.

The play begins with a theatrical "portal," inviting viewers into an interactive museum, a reimagined Constitution Hall, before transporting them to Philadelphia in that sweltering summer of 1776. The dramatized debate is animated through vivid characters: Adams is loud, relentless, and impatient, while Benjamin Franklin's demeanor is calmer, almost camp. Their dynamic captures the show's central theme: Ideas succeed through friction and uncomfortable disagreement.

First performed in 1969, 1776 was staged for two months at Ford's Theatre in 2026. It endures because it refuses to shy away from conflict, reminding us that the battle to persuade and be persuaded is at the heart of politics.

The post Review: This Iconic Musical Reminds Us That Open Debate Still Matters appeared first on Reason.com.

From Bill Melugin of Fox News,

The details of the case are horrific enough. But now we have the added outrage of Democratic politicians trying so score points against “Trump” by preventing the deportation of this monster.

I wrote about a similar case in May involving an armed robber. Minnesota is host to another large, monolithic-voting ethnic community, this one involving Southeast Asians. As with the state’s Somali community, without huge turnout in the Southeast Asian voting block, Democrats could not win elections in Minnesota.

As with any large group, a few of its members have run afoul of the law over the years and have been threatened with deportation. For the first time ever, we have a President (Trump) willing to carry out deportations, and home nations (Laos, Vietnam, etc.) newly willing to take back their own citizens.

To prevent these deportation, Walz and Ellison have been issuing “emergency” pardons that they hope will prevent the execution of final deportation orders filed against these criminals.

An idea so crazy it just may work.