I’ve spent a good bit of the last two weeks on the road, or in the air, at FreedomFest in Las Vegas (libertarians, gambling, and semi-legal prostitution — what could go wrong?) and on a short trip to St. Louis. Between those excursions, it was production week for the new issue of TAC, which will be appearing in bookstores and subscribers’ mailboxes in the next few days.

Las Vegas is Disneyland, only with hookers. I didn’t see any on the street, but they were advertised heavily — the roadside bins where in other cities you can pick up real-estate brochures contain catalogs of girls in Las Vegas. Lining one sidewalk on the Vegas strip was a gauntlet of (presumably) illegal immigrants in neon-green T-shirts handing out cards advertising various demimonde establishments to passersby, few of whom took any interest. The tourists from the Midwest and Japan come for the tacky hotels and the city’s other, more lucrative vice. There are even slot machines in the airport.

Hard-bitten fiscal conservative that I am, I didn’t gamble, although a friend of mine tells me you can get pretty good odds against the house — a little under 50/50 — if you know what you’re doing in craps. FreedomFest itself had some interesting programs, including an always-rousing Campaign for Liberty event with Ron Paul and the absolutely packed sessions of the Liberty editors’ conference. There was standing-room only at Liberty‘s panel on anarchism vs. limited government, which featured Mark Skousen (for minarchism) and David Friedman and Doug Casey (anarchists both, with moderator and Liberty editor Stephen Cox giving Skousen some assistance — Skousen’s intended co-panelist didn’t show). The main sessions of FreedomFest included a great debate on abolishing the Fed, with Tom Woods and Gene Epstein of Barron’s wiping the floor with the pro-Fed John Fund and Warren Coats. (Catch it on C-SPAN this weekend.) While I didn’t gamble, I did fork over some cash at the Laissez-Faire Books table for a copy of Felix Morley’s Freedom and Federalismand the Morley-edited Essays on Individuality (which includes a superb essay by John Dos Passos on individualism in English literature).

In St. Louis the following weekend I looked around my alma mater, Washington University in St. Louis, which is always attractive in the summer but is starting to feel claustrophobic with all the new buildings hemming in the hilltop campus. The economic collapse and decimation of the university’s endowment should put the breaks on any more of that that for a while. I got some good bargains in the campus bookstore, picking up the Transaction edition of Peter Viereck’s Metapoliticsand a copy of Bryan Caplan’s The Myth of the Rational Voter,as well as a Michael Walzer book that reminds me how much I despise egalitarian liberals. The things Walzer sees as defects in society — like hierarchy — I consider virtues in much need of restoration.

Now I’m back in D.C. and the new TAC is out, which means I have time for blogging again.