Americans, like most people in the world, are besieged by authority. How (many? most?) Americans can still believe that theirs is a land of liberty puzzles me greatly, and has done so for many years.
Take Joe Biden — please! — who yesterday said of China’s Xi: “He is a dictator in the sense that he is a guy who runs a country that is communist,” … adding that the Chinese government “is totally different than ours.” Different? In what way?
Atop of all of the millions of pages of federal, State, and local regulations that specify what Americans may and may not do and how their products and services must be produced (or not) — and atop of all of the chicanery that Democrats (mostly) deploy to acquire and sustain the power to tell Americans how to live — there has arisen in the past decade a vast industry of government lying, spying, censorship, and unequal justice that Xi might have designed. (See, for example, “Obamagate and Beyond“, and consider the latest revelation about the censorship industry.)
Americans, like most Westerners, seem to mistake relative prosperity for liberty. (There’s a good example of that in “Biden’s Popularity and Gasoline Prices“.) But like the proverbial frog in the pot of water, Americans will understand what’s happening to them only when it’s too late to do anything about it. (See “Economics: America’s Mega-Depression” and “Convergence Theory Revisited“.)
You have been warned.