“You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.” — Robert Solow, 1987

The dream of upward mobility has long anchored the economic fabric of society, but expanding webs of government regulation increasingly choke off the entryways to entrepreneurship. While massive corporations easily absorb the compliance burdens of dense legal mandates, small business creation faces a steep uphill battle against regulatory excess.

[This article is adapted from the final chapter of Raico’s book The Place of Religion in the Liberal Philosophy of Constant, Tocqueville, and Lord Acton. The book was written as his PhD dissertation, under the direction of F.A. Hayek, and later published by the Mises Institute.]

Despite regularly denouncing the rising socialist menace, President Trump has been pursuing a policy arguably just as, if not more, dangerous to liberty and prosperity as anything proposed by Zohran Mamdani or Bernie Sanders: using government funds to purchase partial ownership of private companies.

Many people are confused by today’s politics or are completely turned off by the current political system. In our natural social state, politics might not even exist or take on a fundamentally different character. Today, the nation and the world is dominated by nationalist-socialist ideology, and politics represents more of what we imagine to be a primitive, jungle warfare existence.