David Brooks (and others) are free
David Brooks is one of my favorite columnists. Like Thomas Sowell, Brooks use simple yet robust reasoning in his columns. One that I am particularly found of is a piece he wrote last fall about Robert Kennedy's "classical education." Simply brilliant stuff. The closing paragraph from that piece:
And the lesson, of course, is about the need to step outside your own immediate experience into the past, to learn about the problems that never change, and bring back some of that inheritance. The leaders who founded the country were steeped in the classics, Kennedy found them in crisis, and today's students are lucky if they stumble on them by happenstance.
Luckily for me, I have had a couple of excellent professors who still place value on such material.
Looking at Brooks' Wikipedia entry, it's interesting to see that he was initially a liberal after graduating from the University of Chicago in 1983. It was only after being intellectually demolished by Milton Friedman in a televised debate did he start the process of switching sides. Brooks on the experience:
The show was essentially me making a point, and he making a two-sentence rebuttal which totally devastated my point, and then me sitting there with my mouth hanging open, trying to think what to say. That didn't immediately turn me into a conservative, but....
Talk about the power of rhetoric. And they say that debates will never convince anyone of anything.
On a side point, it's needless to say that I was quite excited last week to watch the New York Times Select pay wall disappear. Now I can share of Mr. Brooks and Thomas Friedman on a regular basis. Exciting times (pun intended) lay ahead my friends.
