In moments like this — as people grapple to understand variants and vaccines, and kids head back to school — many outlets take their paywalls down. Vox’s content is always free, in part because of financial support from our readers. We’ve been covering the Covid-19 pandemic for more than a year and a half. From the beginning, our goal was to bring clarity to chaos. To empower people with the information they needed to stay safe. And we’re not stopping…
— From a donation request found at the conclusion of an interview on Vox.com, between journalists George F. Will and Ezra Klein, July 2019.
Last Tuesday, September 14, Washington Post columnist George F. Will posted a 2,200-word essay, sharing his feelings about traditional journalism, and about politics and communication — and also, incidentally, plugging his newly-published book, American Happiness and Discontents: The Unruly Torrent 2008-2020, from which the September 14 essay was adapted.
He mentions that his weekly column typically runs about 750 words, so this particular essay appears to be especially generous, in terms of its word court.
The Washington Post essay included this sentence:
Fifty years and 6,000 or so columns later, I number myself among the fortunate few who have lived this familiar axiom: If you love your work, you will never work a day in your life.
I can identify with this sentence, being myself a journalist who loves his job, and who would never refer to his daily task — writing an editorial column for the Daily Post — as “work”. And as with the Vox.com website, quoted above, our Pagosa Daily Post content has always been free, and expects to remain free, long into the future.
The hardcover version of George F. Will’s new book, American Happiness and Discontents, will run you $25. About the price of dinner and a glass of wine at one of our Pagosa restaurants? But less filling?
Not free, however.
The photos used by The Washington Post to illustrate Mr. Will’s September 14 essay were black-and-white images — something we don’t typically see on the Internet…
Perhaps they were hoping to evoke that slowly fading institution known as ‘newspapers’, wherein Mr. Will honed his writing skills, lo, these many years. Mr. Will describes himself in the essay as a “Republican academic” — a species of writer which was, he says, “not quite an oxymoron” when he began his career in the late 1960s, “but then, as now, such creatures were thin on the ground.”
He also comments on his faith in “free markets”, although he doesn’t go quite so far as to use the term “free market capitalism.”
So, as a believer in free markets, and hence in the price system’s rational allocation of society’s resources and energies, I am amused by the fact that this system has made a mistake regarding me. Under sensible pricing of labor, people should be paid the amount necessary to elicit their work. I, however, am paid to do what I would do without pay.
‘Belief’ seems alive and well in the world, nowadays. Belief in ‘free markets’… and the corresponding alternative belief: that ‘free markets’ inherently favor the wealthy and leave the majority of the world, unnecessarily, in relative poverty.
One aspect of the “free market”, nowadays, is the Internet, where I found and read Mr. Will’s entertaining essay. The entertainment wasn’t entirely free, however. I paid a small fee for this privilege, in the sense that I purchased a subscription. several months ago, to the online version of The Washington Post. But that’s how the “free market” works. We, the consumers, make decisions about what products and services we feel will enhance our lives, perhaps based on the advertising that flickered annoyingly on the screen while we were reading a George F. Will essay.
Of course, the word “free” has multiple meanings in modern usage, and its usage has been freely abundant these past few months, as Republican academics and others have argued that Americans ought to be free to use — or to refuse — masks and vaccinations.
Certain Democrat academics have, meanwhile, argued that vaccinations ought to be free — as in, “free of charge” — but that people ought to be mandated to get the injection. So then, not free.
Another popular idea is that oil and gas companies ought to be free to develop and sell petroleum fuels, although they ought to pay a relatively small price for that privilege, when pumping from public lands. And we should all be free to drive our cars, perhaps on freeways, even though we know that the combustion gases produced by our cars are poisoning the air, and possibly altering the global climate.
So what, exactly, is this word we use? “Free”?
Mr. Will participated in a 2019 interview with journalist Ezra Klein, posted on Vox.com, wherein Mr. Will made the following, interesting comment:
I can put it [the concept of elective affinities] in a less recondite way by quoting Virginia Postrel, who said that the story of the Bible, reduced to one sentence, is: “God created man and woman and promptly lost control of events.”
The conservative sensibility, as I understand it, says, “That’s terrific.” The conservative sensibility finds the lack of design and lack of control of a spontaneous-order, free market society to be exhilarating. Some people find it frightening; others find it offensive that things are going on without people organizing it and bossing people around. The conservative sensibility says lack of control is a good thing.
This is an essential idea, I think, for Mr. Will and many of his fellow conservatives: the idea that ‘freedom’ is defined by lack of control, and that the lack of control is exhilarating. And he is certainly on target, when he says that some people find a lack of control frightening.
As I mentioned, I find it fascinating that the English word for something provided without asking for payment, is “free”. And the same word is used in a very different context, to denote human behaviors that are “not controlled by someone else.”
Tomorrow, I’d like to dig a little deeper into those two contrasting meanings, and see if we can find a connection.
Or not?
Bill Hudson began sharing his opinions in the Pagosa Daily Post in 2004 and can’t seem to break the habit. He claims that, in Pagosa Springs, opinions are like pickup trucks: everybody has one.