SOURCE: Freund, Charles Paul. “Market Culture: Bashed and Unabashed.” Reason 28, no. 8 (January 1997): 54.

In the following essay, Freund examines the issues of capitalism and left-wing vs. right-wing politics in response to The People vs. Larry Flynt.

Quick: Name an icon of “capitalism at its most unabashed.” Who'd you come up with? Somebody like Bill Gates from the exploding information economy? A Daddy Warbucks from Wall Street? Some old-time, public-be-damned robber baron?

The correct answer—at least the one given by The New York Times—is pornographer Larry Flynt. [He is] portrayed by Woody Harrelson in Milos Forman's movie, The People vs. Larry Flynt. The Times reviewed the film when it played the New York Film Festival, praising the characterization of Flynt as “a maverick vulgarian who embodies capitalism at its most unabashed.”

Critic Janet Maslin thought the film's opening sequence particularly good: It shows the young Flynt, then a...