The new Free Radical magazine is out, and this issue has lessons for most, good reading for all... and a special free offer that should have everyone happy.

When the Berlin Wall fell it was obvious to everyone with eyes to see and a brain to think with that socialism had been tried, and it had failed spectacularly. No one alive at the time could fail to get the lesson: Socialism Sucks.

But it seems lessons that big have to be relearned every generation: the tragedy of Venezuela should be this generation’s object lesson that Socialism Sucks.

Socialism came to Venezuela, and in its inevitable wake has come poverty, penury and oppressive totalitarian rule. This issue of The Free Radical sends out A Challenge to Young Socialists to watch, and to learn – and to reject this ideological harbinger of misery.

Let freedom reign! Let freedom reign in boardrooms, bedrooms and smoko rooms. We talk to NZ Green MP Metiria Turei who wants to let freedom reign in New Zealand’s hospital treatment rooms, allowing medical practitioners to prescribe a drug that, as Jonothan Rennie's History of Medical Marijuana points out, was once used by Queen Victoria – a drug that Lancet has confirmed is less harmful than either alcohol or tobacco.

There’s much, much more in this issue:

• Frank Shostak and Lary Sechrest explain how economic illiterates and central banks make us poor;
• Lindsay Perigo and Muriel Newman lament the rise and rise and rise of Nanny State - as Perigo describes her, that disgusting "hybrid of gargoyle and dominatrix";
• George Reisman on how the thricefold seductions of socialism, environmentalism and irrational skepticism (but surely I repeat myself) are fuelled by irrational education;
• we have an obituary for the New Zealand woman who’s left several generations of students around the world functionally illiterate;
• an interview with the man to whose gun shop knife-wielding would-be suicide victims seem to be drawn;
• dissidence from "a dissident president";
• global warming sense from another president - "environmental extremism is the modern equivalent of communism," says Czech president Vaclav Klaus;
• confessions of a former warmist who threw himself off the global warming gravy train;

advice for parents from Larry Sechrest and Tia Wooller: Don't fake reality;

• an obituary for a philosopher whose own grip on reality was slight. He died, we think;
• reviews of conman Conrad Black's eulogy to "champion of freedom" Franklin Roosevelt, Al Gore's upfront assault on reason and the internet, and Stephen Hicks' exegesis of Nietzsche and the Nazis;

… all this and much more in this latest issue including new and regular columnists to challenge your funnybone and your thinking, and great scads of The Free Radical's usual brand of irreverent wit.

I invite you to step inside Free Radical 76: Politics, Economics & Life As If Freedom Mattered, and load up on intellectual ammunition!

Subscribe here.

Download a digital copy here.

Buy your hard copy (NZ only) from one of these quality outlets.

But that's not all. We're so confident of the quality of each and every copy of The Free Radical that this month we're throwing open our digital back issues. That's right: All digital back issues of The Free Radical are free! See below for links.

We're convinced that once you see the quality of our back issues, you won't want to miss out on getting your NEW copy of the Free Radical in your letterbox hot off the press.

Enjoy!

Cheers, Peter Cresswell
EDITOR, THE FREE RADICAL
PC.Blogspot.Com

DIGITAL FREE RADICAL BACK ISSUES -- all free to good homes:
FREE RADICAL 75: The Naked Truth About Self-Defence
FREE RADICAL 74: The Environmental Noose is Tightening!
FREE RADICAL 73: The Assault on Free Speech
FREE RADICAL 72: The Great Environmental Sellout
FREE RADICAL 71: The Stolen Election!