Sublime

The narrative of Free America remained as inflexible as any ideology: tax cuts and deregulation = freedom and prosperity. Decade after decade you encountered its mantra, like the rituals of a cargo cult, on the website of the Cato Institute, the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal, broadcasts of The Rush Limbaugh Show, and the platform of the

Liberty is the freedom to define one’s own happiness. Happiness is the emotional engine powering the United States. It is the only country to make the pursuit of happiness a fundamental right.

either immediately or ultimately every dollar of government spending must be raised through a dollar of taxation.

“What’s Moore’s Law?” the senator asked. “You have to understand, Senator,” Reid interjected, “that in Washington, you assume that every year things cost more and do less. In Silicon Valley, everyone expects our products to cost less every year but do more.”

the Old Guard’s Warren G. Harding was elevated directly from his Senate desk to the White House, in his ears his colleagues’ admonition to “sign whatever bills the Senate sent him and not send bills for the Senate to pass.” Under Harding and Coolidge and Hoover, this “normalcy” was to last for almost a decade—a decade during which, slowly but

What distinguished libertarians from mainstream pro-business Republicans—Mailer’s parade of delegates in Miami Beach—was their pure and uncompromising idea. What was it? Hayek: “Planning leads to dictatorship.” The purpose of government is to secure individual rights, little else.

At the present day the more affluent classes of society are so entirely removed from the direction of political affairs in the United States that wealth, far from conferring a right to the exercise of power, is rather an obstacle than a means of attaining to