"These days most people tend to equate freedom with the possession of inalienable individual rights, rights that demarcate a private sphere no government may infringe on. But has this always been the case?"
With the Caribbean trade bloc Caricom, we find an international "free" trade agreement being used by a Dominica-based company to demand more limits on trade between Jamaica and a country outside the bloc. This isn't about free trade.
If the FBI and the Pentagon have already demonstrated their officials are willing to break and bend rules to obstruct Trump, why believe the administrative class when they insist elections are free and fair and all above board?
Now is not the time to pine for the days of agreeable politics. In recent decades, the US has gone through radical political and cultural transformations that are making the country progressively ungovernable.
The 1920s featured political détente, debt liquidations by prior consumer price inflation, an introductory stalling of monetary inflation, a German economic miracle, and a broad-based technological revolution. The 2020s have none of these.
Corporate cost cutting sets the stage for future gains in profitability and productivity, and there is no resulting "paradox of thrift" requiring easy money policies to "fix" the problem.
In his new book, conservative author R.R. Reno thinks that openness is not a strong enough principle for a society to rally behind. Unfortunately, his answer is to get behind the state.
