David Mamet: Why I'm No Longer a Brain Dead Liberal

The Wall Street Journal's David Henninger writes about David Mamet, who wrote a piece in the Village Voice last week titled, Why I'm No Longer a Brain Dead Liberal - which likely caused The David Mamet Society to disband immediately. Drudge noticed, most ignored it though - but it clearly struck a nerve with some.

Mamet:

As a child of the '60s, I accepted as an article of faith that government is corrupt, that business is exploitative, and that people are generally good at heart.

He goes on:

the synthesis of this worldview with which I now found myself disenchanted: that everything is always wrong.
But in my life, a brief review revealed, everything was not always wrong, and neither was nor is always wrong in the community in which I live, or in my country. Further, it was not always wrong in previous communities in which I lived, and among the various and mobile classes of which I was at various times a part.

And on:

And I began to question my hatred for "the Corporations"—the hatred of which, I found, was but the flip side of my hunger for those goods and services they provide and without which we could not live.

And on:

I began reading not only the economics of Thomas Sowell (our greatest contemporary philosopher) but Milton Friedman, Paul Johnson, and Shelby Steele, and a host of conservative writers, and found that I agreed with them: a free-market understanding of the world meshes more perfectly with my experience than that idealistic vision I called liberalism.

David, here at The FDC, Sowell, Friedman, and Steele are some of our biggest heroes. If I may, I'd also like to suggest you read Julian Simon's The Ultimate Resource II.