Wednesday, July 11, 2007

America Has Grown More Libertarian?

It has, according to Cato's Brink Lindsey:
[G]rading on a global and historical curve, America is a distinctively libertarian country. And despite the best efforts of ideologues on both the left and right, it has grown more libertarian, on the whole, over the past few decades.
Lindsey supports that conclusion by citing (among other things) specific changes in our laws and mores. (Many of those specific changes are signs not of liberty but of license.) Lindsey fails to reckon with the big picture: the ceaselessly growing burden of taxation and regulation that has pushed us further from the degree of health, wealth, and happiness that we would enjoy absent the regulatory-welfare state.

For more about the huge and growing cost of the regulatory-welfare state, see this. Also, go here and here.