Endless war. A $23 trillion national debt. Intrusive regulation. Criminal injustice. Presidents who don’t think the Constitution limits their powers. It’s easy to point to troubling aspects of modern America, and I spend a lot of time doing that. But when a journalist asked me what freedoms we take for granted in America, I found it a good opportunity to step back and consider how America is different from much of world history — and why immigrants still flock here.


If we ask how life in the United States is different from life in most of the history of the world — and still different from much of the world — a few key elements come to mind.



Rule of law. Perhaps the greatest achievement in history is the subordination of power to law. That is, in modern America we have created structures that limit and control the arbitrary power of government. No longer can one man — a king, a priest, a communist party boss — take another person’s life or property at the ruler’s whim. Citizens can go about their business, generally confident that they won’t be dragged off the streets to disappear forever, and confident that their hard-earned property won’t be confiscated without warning. We may take the rule of law for granted, but immigrants from China, Haiti, Syria, and other parts of the world know how rare it is.



Equality. For most of history people were firmly assigned to a particular status — clergy, nobility, and peasants. Kings and lords and serfs. Brahmins, other castes, and untouchables in India. If your father was a noble or a peasant, so would you be. The American Revolution swept away such distinctions. In America all men were created equal — or at least that was our promise and our aspiration. Thomas Jefferson declared “that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God.” In America some people may be smarter, richer, stronger, or more beautiful than others, but “I’m as good as you” is our national creed. We are all citizens, equal before the law, free to rise as far as our talents will take us.



Equality for women. Throughout much of history women were the property of their fathers or their husbands. They were often barred from owning property, testifying in court, signing contracts, or participating in government. Equality for women took longer than equality for men, but today in America and other civilized parts of the world women have the same legal rights as men.



Self-government. The Declaration of Independence proclaims that “governments are instituted” to secure the rights of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” and that those governments “derive their just powers from the consent of the governed.” Early governments were often formed in the conquest of one people by another, and the right of the rulers to rule was attributed to God’s will and passed along from father to son. In a few places — Athens, Rome, medieval Germany — there were fitful attempts to create a democratic government. Now, after America’s example, we take it for granted in civilized countries that governments stand or fall on popular consent. 



Freedom of speech. In a world of Fox and MSNBC, Facebook and Twitter, it’s hard to imagine just how new and how rare free speech is. Lots of people died for the right to say what they believed. In China, Russia, Africa, and the Arab world, they still do. Fortunately, we’ve realized that while free speech may irritate each of us at some point, we’re all better off for it.



Freedom of religion. Church and state have been bound together since time immemorial. The state claimed divine sanction, the church got money and power, the combination left little room for freedom. As late as the 17th century, Europe was wracked by religious wars. England, Sweden, and other countries still have an established church, though their citizens are free to worship elsewhere. Many people used to think that a country could only survive if everyone worshipped the one true God in the one true way. The American Founders established religious freedom.



Property and contract. We owe our unprecedented standard of living to the capitalist freedoms of private property and free markets. When people are able to own property and make contracts, they create wealth. Free markets and the legal institutions to enforce contracts make possible vast economic undertakings — from the design and construction of airplanes to Bitcoin and Venmo. But to appreciate the benefits of free markets, we don’t have to marvel at skyscrapers while listening to music on our iPhones. We can just give thanks for enough food to live on, and central heating, and the medical care that has lowered the infant mortality rate from about 20 percent to less than 1 percent.


A Kenyan boy who managed to get to the United States told a reporter for Woman’s World magazine that America is “heaven.” Compared to countries that lack the rule of law, equality, property rights, free markets, and freedom of speech and worship, it certainly is. A good point to keep in mind this Thanksgiving Day.



A version of this article was published in 2004 and was included in my book The Politics of Freedom.

Facebook has decided not to suppress putative falsehoods in political ads on its platform. This decision has many critics. I see three ways forward for Facebook.

First, stay with the policy. The policy is close to the American free speech tradition. It assumes Facebook users have the right and ability to discern truth and falsehood. Regardless of their veracity or original target audience, all political ads are preserved in Facebook’s Ad Library, where anyone can view them.

Second, refuse to run ads with “falsehoods.” Suppressing falsehoods in ads would produce false positives: some “lies” would turn out to be truths. Many “lies” would turn out to be contestable propositions that one side or the other deems “an obvious lie.” Some valuable speech will be suppressed, and both sides in our pathological politics will conclude that Facebook has sided with their adversaries. Regulation to follow. Facebook could simply refuse to run any political ads. Determining what is a political ad will be a problem. It is a troublesome distinction even in the less punitive context of Facebook’s advertiser registration requirement. But note: suppressing all political ads will produce large numbers of false positives (that is, worthwhile speech that is treated like a lie). That doesn’t seem like an idea to be pursued in a liberal society, even though, of course, Facebook has the right to refuse to run all ads.

Third, limit the reach (but not the content) of ads with falsehoods. Here’s the idea: instead of presenting a political ad to 500 users, all of whom might be open to the content of the ad, Facebook could refuse to sell political ads to fewer than 5,000 users. (The numbers may not be exact, but you get the idea). Where a smaller audience might not have seen any debate about the ad, the larger audience will have many people who have doubts about the content of the ad. A debate might well ensue. The 500 users that might have heard nothing against the ad have the possibility of hearing “more speech” about the “lie.”

This third option is brilliant in its own way. This revised policy would not suppress speech directly. Instead, Facebook could say that broadening the audience for an ad would foster more speech about the ad and thereby improve public debate.

But this policy actually contravenes an idea undergirding free speech: people have the right and ability to discern truth from falsehood. Critics of microtargeting disagree. Writing in the New Scientist [paywalled], Annalee Newitz recently argued that “microtargeting allows political lies on Facebook to reach only the people most likely to fall for them.” Those people, she writes, need to hear from “watchdog groups” who presumably will set them straight. Can counterspeech rooted in the belief that some people are incapable of distinguishing truth and lies ever be consistent with free speech? Facebook is free, of course, to practice such speech paternalism. But it will have forsaken a fundamental belief of the liberal tradition and no doubt have opened the door to ever more bullying in the future.

Millions of Americans will deal with the hassles of air travel this week as they join their families for Thanksgiving. Airports are crowded, flights get delayed, and travelers get stuck in long security lines. Things may get worse as aviation demand rises and puts even more strain on the system. The chart below shows total annual U.S. airline passengers on scheduled flights.

In most industries, businesses respond to rising demand by investing in new capacity. But in aviation, major parts of the industry—security screening, airports, and air traffic control—are run by the government, an institution not known for investing efficiently. The solution is to privatize all these aviation infrastructure activities, which is the successful approach taken by Canada and numerous European countries.

U.S. airport screening is run by the unionized Transportation Security Administration, which has a reputation for intrusive pat downs and inept management. Former TSA chief Kip Hawley called the agency “hopelessly bureaucratic.” Studies in the past found that TSA screening performance is no better, and possibly worse, than private-sector screening, which is allowed at some U.S. airports. The TSA has a habit of wasting money on useless activities, leaving it less to invest on things that benefit travelers, such as more screening stations.

Congress should move responsibility for screening to the airports and allow them to contract out to expert security firms. Private firms would be able to flexibly adjust their workforces to reduce congestion, and they would end low-value procedures that waste traveler time.

Another barrier to aviation efficiency is that all U.S. commercial airports are owned by governments. Federal funding for “airport improvements is provided in a highly politicized manner with little regard for return on investment,” noted the Eno Center. At the same time, the federal government restricts airports from raising fees to fund their own improvements.

The current funding system, which relies on politicians, makes no sense. If airports were privatized—as they have been in many other nations—they could access funding from customer charges, advertising, and debt and equity to invest in new facilities and meet rising demands.

Air traffic control also suffers under government ownership. ATC is a complex, dynamic, high-tech business, and yet we run it as a D.C. bureaucracy. The Federal Aviation Administration’s record on technology upgrades has been poor. It is moving ahead with NextGen, a series of projects to bring GPS and digital communications into air traffic management. But upgrades have been delayed because of FAA mismanagement and inefficient federal funding. The airline trade association discussed FAA reforms in this recent testimony.

The solution is privatization. In Canada the ATC system is run by the nonprofit corporation Nav Canada, after being privatized in 1996. The reform is a big success. Nav Canada has an excellent safety record, is a leader in technology, and has won international awards for performance. The Canadian system would be a great model for U.S. reforms.

America was the global leader in 20th century aviation, but today we risk falling behind. To meet growing passenger demand and improve the public’s flying experience, policymakers should adopt the best practices of 21st century aviation, including privatizing security screening, airports, and air traffic control.

Chart data from here and here.

Hillary Clinton and Chelsea Clinton have a new book out, The Book of Gutsy Women. The publisher says they “share the stories of the gutsy women who have inspired them—women with the courage to stand up to the status quo, ask hard questions, and get the job done.” They certainly tell the stories of some inspiring women — Harriet Tubman, Helen Keller, Anne Frank, Maria Montessori, Marie Curie, and more. But I couldn’t help noticing some women who didn’t make it into the book’s 432 pages.

• not Margaret Thatcher, who fought every day to make her way up in an almost totally male-dominated political system;
• not Ayn Rand, who fled the Bolshevik revolution to become a bestselling novelist of ideas in her third language;
• not Jeannette Rankin, the first woman elected to Congress, who became the only Member of Congress to vote against U.S. participation in both World War I and World War II;
• not Anne Hutchinson, who fought the Puritan theocracy of Massachusetts and was banished from the colony;
• not businesswomen such as Helena Rubinstein, Elizabeth Arden, and Estee Lauder, all of whom climbed out of poverty and built major cosmetics businesses;
• not Marva Collins, Virginia Walden Ford, and Eva Moskowitz, who fought to give poor families alternatives to failing public schools;
• not Lilli Vincenz and Barbara Gittings, who came out of the closet and fought for gay and lesbian rights when doing so could mean losing one’s job, family, or life;
• not Deirdre McCloskey, who as a successful 53-year-old economist in 1995 decided to recognize her female identity and transition.

I suppose these women were just a bit too gutsy for the authors. Thatcher too capitalist, Rand too individualist, Rankin too antiwar, and so on. These women epitomize the line from historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich: Well-behaved women seldom make history. And they don’t quite fit the parameters of Hillary and Chelsea Clinton’s East Coast Establishment woke-but-not-too-woke liberalism.

Customs and Border Protection apprehended 1,148,024 people during Fiscal Year 2019. Border Patrol apprehended 75 percent of them while CBP officers apprehended the remaining quarter. The number of people CBP apprehended was up 68 percent over 2018, but the number of criminals arrested in 2019 was only up about 15 percent over the previous year. As a result, criminal apprehensions in 2019 comprised the smallest share of all apprehensions since 2015, when publicly available data were first published online (Figure 1). We only have data for the first month of the 2020 fiscal year, so those numbers are included even though this post will not draw conclusions about 2020 from a single month of data.

Figure 1

CBP Apprehensions by Criminal Status, 2015–2020

Source: CBP

Note: 2020 data is for the first month of that fiscal year.

The number of people apprehended by Border Patrol was up 112 percent from 2018 to 2019, from 404,142 to 859,501. Although the number of Border Patrol apprehensions more than doubled, the number of criminals apprehended rose by just 2.1 percent. Border Patrol separately recorded the number of convictions of those it apprehended in each year by crime (Table 1). The number of convictions is different from the number of criminals, as one criminal could have multiple convictions. In 2019, the number of criminal convictions spread among those apprehended criminals dropped by 31 percent. The number of criminal convictions among those criminals apprehended is lower for every crime except for Illegal Weapons Possession, Transport, Trafficking. This occurred while the number of apprehensions doubled.

Table 1

Border Patrol Criminal Alien Statistics, 2015–2019

Source: CBP.

There were only two convictions for homicide and manslaughter among the 859,501 Border Patrol apprehended in 2019. That is the stock of convictions for homicide and manslaughter. Even if it was the number of new convictions in 2019, it would be shockingly low.

Perhaps Border Patrol agents apprehended fewer criminals in 2019 because they were diverted to processing asylum claims, leaving fewer agents available to patrol the border which allowed more criminal aliens to evade detection. Thus, the observed falling numbers of criminal aliens apprehended could arise from a lack of detection rather than fewer criminals trying to enter. The number of single adults apprehended in recent years is evidence against that theory. They are the most likely to be criminals. However, the number of single adults apprehended by Border Patrol has risen over the years and the number apprehended by CBP Officers at ports of entry has only dropped slightly. This isn’t a slam dunk response but merely evidence against the theory that Border Patrol is distracted by asylum seekers while criminals are entering undetected.

A profile in the New York Times finds it “odd” that almost everyone loves country entertainment legend Dolly Parton even though she “has remained reluctant to make the slightest hint of a political statement.” I think that should win some sort of prize for statements that are best at missing what is in plain sight.

Do most people really want politics to play that big a part in their lives or their choice of entertainment? I don’t know, but here are some of the reactions I’ve seen this morning on social media:

• “She’s been an entertainer and a generous person. Why not leave it at that?”
• “The general idea seems to be ‘if something doesn’t have a political statement in it, it’s not good enough’.”
• “ ‘I don’t understand. ‘Be a good person’ is a perfectly legitimate political statement. And Miss Dolly is a heck of an exemplar.”
• “Donating a [hundred] million books is a political statement even if the New York Times doesn’t think it is.”

I could go on about how “Coat of Many Colors,” “Jolene,” and “I Will Always Love You” have something permanent to say about poverty, about the thing between men and women, and about responding to bad treatment with forgiveness and magnanimity, and that the answers to those problems of life (when they even have answers) don’t necessarily lead through politics. But I’ll go back to quoting another social media reaction:

• “Dolly Parton’s life is a political statement for those with eyes to see and ears to hear.”

Reacting to a media-fueled panic surrounding teen vaping, Massachusetts legislators this week banned the sale of all flavored e‑cigarettes, including menthol, and levied a 75 percent excise tax on vaping products. This was portrayed as “a forceful response to an epidemic in which one out of every five Massachusetts high-schoolers use e‑cigarettes.” In reality, it is an impulsive act that ignores the evidence and endangers public health.

Teen vaping rates should not be viewed in a vacuum. According to the National Youth Tobacco Survey teen tobacco smoking is at an all-time low. Professor Michael Siegel of Boston University School of Public Health reports a strong negative correlation between teen vaping and teen tobacco smoking. In other words, e‑cigarettes are probably behind the drop in teen tobacco smoking.

Numerous scientific studies show that vaping is a very effective way to help tobacco smokers quit smoking. And while vaping might not be completely harmless, tobacco smoking is a proven killer. According to Public Health England e‑cigarettes are “95 percent less harmful” than tobacco cigarettes. And research finds e‑cigarettes are “twice as effective” as nicotine patches or gum in helping smokers quit.

There were an estimated 11 million vapers in the U.S. in 2018, and as of late November there have been an estimated 2,172 cases of vaping-related illnesses with 44 deaths reported. For perspective, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention states 16 million Americans live with tobacco smoking-related illness and 480,000 die annually.

Interestingly, vaping-related lung injuries have not been reported outside of the U.S. This raises the question of whether the outbreak might be an unintended consequence of public policy.

Germane to that question, the CDC reported earlier this month the results of tests on 29 randomly collected samples of lung fluid in patients hospitalized for vaping-related illness. All 29 samples contained vitamin E acetate, the synthetic form of vitamin E. Vitamin E acetate is an oil, and is suitable for ingesting, but can cause severe lung damage if inhaled.

Vitamin E acetate is commonly used as the vehicle for delivering THC, the psychoactive ingredient in cannabis, in vaping cartridges. The CDC reported that 86 percent of the patients sampled said they had vaped an illegal THC product. This was based upon self-reporting, so the actual percentage may be higher.

Vitamin E acetate is not used by legal e‑cigarette cartridge makers because of its harmful effects on the lungs. Its presence in vaping liquid indicates a black-market source.

As long as federal marijuana prohibition continues, the only way for vapers to get THC-containing liquids is by making them on their own with cannabis products or buying them in the dangerous black market.

Commenting on the CDC test results, Professor Siegel stated, “states which have issued emergency regulations to ban e‑cigarettes or flavored e‑cigarettes are not justified in using their emergency powers for this purpose since it is almost assuredly the case that those store-bought products have nothing to do with the outbreak.”

Flavored vaping liquids are very popular among teen vapers. But they are also the choice of more than 90 percent of adult tobacco smokers wanting to quit. One former tobacco smoker, who now vapes tells me, “Why should I choose tobacco flavored vaping liquid when I can experience the real thing from a cigarette?”

A ban on flavored vaping not only harms adult tobacco smokers wishing to quit. It also harm teens.

It has been federally illegal to sell e‑cigarettes to persons under 18 since 2016. Yet teens manage to obtain e‑cigarettes and cartridges. Oftentimes they obtain bootleg products on the black market made with dangerous substances such as vitamin E acetate. The Drug Enforcement Administration recently reported that the Mexican drug cartels are getting into the bootleg vaping business, and some of their products are laced with illicit fentanyl. An outright ban on the sale of legally produced vaping cartridges can only make matters worse.