A Cry from the Far Middle: Dispatches from a Divided Land

But in politics only one side can win. What’s at stake in politics isn’t goods and services, it’s power. Power is always zero-sum. When I sell you goods and services I gain something in return. When I sell you power over myself—and that’s the political exchange—I stand to lose everything.

And how did our government get so bad? Bad politics. But how did our politics get so bad? Politics grew worse because politics grew.

Government and politics are different. Government is . . . words fail me . . . government. Politics is the fight over who runs the government. And the fix is in because, as you may have noticed, every time politicians stage that fight a politician wins.

In 1945 only the lucky few could be called citizens of a free country. Today, 39 percent of the world’s population has political freedom, another 24 percent has partial freedom, and 74 percent of the world’s 195 nations are at least free enough to give Classical Liberalism a try.

Socialism has been tried. And tried. We have a proven track record of how it goes. A track record that’s more than a century long as of the October 2017 one hundredth anniversary of the Russian Revolution. That went well.

Transformations in health care have turned the historically cheapest part of being alive—dying—into something so expensive that many people can’t afford to do it.

According to the Census Bureau, 62.7 percent of Americans live in urban areas, on only 3.5 percent of the country’s land.

In the report we see that the federal government spends $877.5 billion annually on these benefits and services. And let us note that this spending does not include Social Security, Medicare, unemployment insurance, or Affordable Care Act subsidies. However, the $877.5 billion does include $467.8 billion spent on health care for the poor in programs

Civil liberties. Free speech. Property rights. Rule of law. Representative democracy. Free enterprise. Free trade. These are the ideas of Classical Liberalism. Since 1776 the fortunate among us have been living in places where those ideas were embraced.