I choose choice, i.e., freedom, which is more precious than life itself. I will not have socialist intellectuals making my choices for me. Apparently, the only "choice" they would allow is the choice to kill your baby, and the only "diversity" they approve is that produced by racist quotas. I'm against that.

As Ayn Rand observed, the critics of capitalism contradict themselves or each other all the time. Capitalism produces poverty, predicted Marx. No, said others, it produces too much wealth. Capitalists profit from war, said the pacifists. No, said the militarists, it makes men soft and unfit for war. Capitalism leads to monopoly, argued some. No, said others, it produces too much diversity, too much choice. The critics or enemies of capitalism are going to have to choose an argument and stick with it.

G. K. Chesterton observed the same pattern of contradictions among the enemies of Christianity, which is one of the things that converted him to it.

Virginia Postrel is right. There's no such thing as "too much" choice. When I go into a store, I know what I want and look for it. I also look for a book at Amazon or Barnes & Noble that I'm hungering for. Or a blog that I like. I choose a restaurant from a vast variety of restaurants, and then I look at a menu and love contemplating the vast variety of delicious foods to choose from, and then choose the one that sounds best. I enjoy the process of choosing among a vast variety of products, of curtains and desserts and religions, of every kind. A lot of people, especially women it seems, seem to enjoy shopping for its own sake. Beats waiting in a long line at a Communist store for the one generic product the state chooses for you.

Yes, choice does entail commitment. If I choose to be a skydiver, then I am not at the same moment choosing to be a deep sea diver. If I choose to draw a triangle, then it cannot have more nor less than 3 sides. If I'm reading a book by Chesterton on the evils of Prussianism, then I'm not at the same time reading a post by Eric Scheie on the blessings of capitalism, or it is perhaps somewhat difficult to do so. If I marry one woman, then I am not marrying another, and I must be faithful forever to that one woman I have chosen to marry. That's the way it is. That's the way it must be, by the very essence of our existence, the Divine order in which alone we have our freedom.

Discrimination is the essence of choice. To choose is to discriminate. The two are synonymous. Discrimination is not a dirty word. Nor is it a synonym for racism, as the egalitarians would have you believe. Indeed, the racist's blunder is precisely that he fails to discriminate, as, e.g., between one Negro and another, believing that "they are all alike". I, by contrast, will most certainly discriminate between, e.g., a George Washington Carver and a Jesse Jackson. We must always discriminate, e.g., between the music of a Beethoven and what passes for "music" among many today, between the masterwork of a Leonardo da Vinci and the garbage of a Marcel Duchamp, between the noble rhetoric of an E. Merrill Root and the base rhetoric of a "post-modern" nihilist. Discrimination is good. We need far more discrimination, not less.