Smashing Magazine offers up examples of stylish e-commerce designs. Of course, the visual design of an e-commerce site is properly secondary to its main purpose: sales.

New findings suggests that young people are rejecting traditional suburbia. If it’s true, market demand will drive more urban housing; planners need not interfere (via Beyond DC).

And last but not least, why the iPad can’t fully replace newspapers:

F.A. Hayek Photo: Wikimedia

America’s national debt recently crossed the $13 trillion mark, and taxpayers are on the hook for several times that amount as government spending on social programs rises uncontrollably.

Congress would do well to heed F.A. Hayek’s warning in The Constitution of Liberty: “[D]emocracy will have to learn that it must pay for its own follies and that it cannot draw unlimited checks on the future to solve its present problems.”

Edmund Burke Photo: Wikimedia

Jonathan Adler argues that many self-described followers of Edmund Burke are anything but: “The institutions [David] Brooks would defend today bear no resemblance to the organic institutions Burke sought to protect.  Indeed, they have crowded out and, in some cases crushed, the little platoons upon which social order depends.  So the meaningful question for a true Burkean is not whether to oppose a Jacobin revolution, but what to do after such a revolution has already taken place.”

In the latest issue of A List Apart, Ethan Marcotte explains how to use CSS style sheets to create a web site that scales well to varying screen resolutions. For example, he uses CSS media queries to create a single page that renders well on an iPhone, on a standard monitor and on a wide-screen monitor. I’ve implemented some of his techniques on this page to make an iPhone-friendly version.

Europe’s “current welfare state is unaffordable…The crisis has made the day of reckoning closer by several years in virtually all the industrial countries.”

And last but not least, Google has made several excellent fonts available for free use on other sites through a simple CSS call. OFL Sorts Mill Goudy TT is now the default font for this  site.

Rand Paul. Photo: Gage Skidmore

Kentucky Senate candidate Rand Paul, son of Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX), won the Republican primary on Tuesday in part by smoothing over differences with traditional conservatives, as David Weigel explains. Can this new, libertarian-leaning fusionism prevail in November?

Paul seems to have already gotten himself in some trouble for his  remarks about the Civil Rights Act. Mark Tapscott warns that the liberal-leaning media is likely to jump all over such rookie mistakes.

Cautioning that Paul’s particular brand of conservatism may not be viable outside Kentucky, Daniel Larison outlines the younger Paul’s political beliefs:

First of all, Paul is one of a very few Republican candidates in the country who is truly serious in his desire for fiscal responsibility. In his hostility to expansive government and reckless spending, he does not make exceptions for military spending, and he is appropriately skeptical of government power whether it comes in the form of military adventurism and empire-building or sweeping social legislation and bailouts.

Speaking of sweeping legislation, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget offers a budget simulator that challenges you to push the federal debt under 60 percent of GDP by 2018. It’s curious that many (though not all) of its fixes amount to fiddling around the edges, where more substantial reforms, like tax simplification or paring back of whole spending programs, may be more appropriate. Special challenge: win the game without imposing onerous new taxes!

The Washington Post reports, for example, that “gay groups and liberal legal scholars say they are prevailing” in lawsuits against private individuals and companies that do not offer services to homosexuals “because an individual’s religious views about homosexuality cannot be used to violate gays’ right to equal treatment under the law.” The article cites several businesses, including a psychologist and a photographer, that have been penalized in the courts for offering their services only to heterosexuals. And it accepts that there is a fundamental “right to be free from discrimination” that clashes with other, more traditional rights.

But what fundamental rights are harmed if a psychologist or photographer chooses one client over another–whether for religious reasons or more mundane reasons like his bottom line? Is there really a natural “right to counseling” that imposes on psychologists the obligation to take any patient? Is there really a God-given “right to have your picture taken” that imposes on photographers the obligation to snap pictures of all comers? And is there really a “right to be free from discrimination?”

There are, in fact, no such natural rights. As with any “right” that imposes an obligation on another individual, these are inventions of the state, more akin to entitlements than to anything described in the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution. The “right to be free from discrimination” is more a social ideal, a goal for interpersonal interaction, than it is a description of a core characteristic of a human individual, like property ownership or speech. In fact, since these social “rights” impose obligations on others, they tend to infringe upon individual liberty, for instance the freedom of a service provider to specialize his practice. Far from securing “equal treatment under the law,” this tends to create special legal privileges for some and special legal obligations for others.

The psychologist and photographer in question were almost certainly in the wrong. In most cases it would be uncouth to turn away a customer simply because of an objection to his sexual preferences (or race or any other immutable characteristic), even if that objection is grounded in the sincerest religious or moral belief. But to do so is merely rude, not a violation of the customer’s fundamental rights as a human being. It is in fact a violation of the provider’s liberty for the government to enforce an invented right in the name of equality and prevention of discrimination. A better solution than turning to government would rely on two time-tested methods to set things straight: shame and the provider’s bottom line. If you don’t like how the provider runs his business and chooses his clients, you are free to criticize him and take your business elsewhere.