Greg Mankiw throws in the towel after his lazy, verbatim post from the White House on S-CHIP caused a lot of blowback.
Notice how reflexively illiberal those hailing from the Right can get about free speech:
The growth in the comments section was fine with me, as long as the discussion remained civil. Mostly it was, and I learned a lot from the comments. But unfortunately, a few (usually anonymous) commenters too often crossed the line.
Meanwhile, it is possible to cut off anonymous comments, so I think there is no reason to take this 'objection' at face value (nor did I find a few regular, anonymous commenters crossing the line, and I'm a fairly harsh judge of that kind of thing).
It just caught my eye, because there is a strong case to be made, I believe, that the Right is not interested in 'debate' at all. In fact, "free thinkers" are discouraged, and publishers, like Regnery, are interested in instilling 'orthodoxy' among the young, not teaching them how to think. Just my 2-cents.
Andrew, I think, has his special reasons for not allowing comments. However, I see no parallel with, say, Dale Carpenter, who seldom, if ever opens up his pieces to debate, making them look more like 'epistles'. As I recall, some people on the anti-gay marriage side of things got annoyed with the tactic of turning off comments after the first 48 hours or something, over at Volokh.
Update: More confirming evidence, from Brad DeLong's blogologalogue:
Megan McArdle (October 16, 2007) - I take it all back: A conservative publication, which I will not name, just spiked a book review because I said that the Laffer Curve didn't apply at American levels of taxation, even while otherwise expressing my vast displeasure with the (liberal) economic notions of the book I was reviewing. This isn't me looking for an alternative explanation for the spiking of a bad review: the literary editor accepted it, edited it, and then three hours later told me it couldn't be published because it violated their editorial line on taxation.
I suppose I ought to have known, but I didn't. Go ahead liberals, pile on: you told me so...
