 In the year 2000, the United States ranked sixth in our human freedom index. It now ranks 23. So there's this, this is a particularly- Yeah, do you want to show that chart? Here's the ranking. We've got Switzerland, New Zealand, Estonia, Denmark, Ireland rounding out the top five, and then you go down US at 23 below Belgium and Austria and the United Kingdom. If you look at the graph of freedom in the United States, it doesn't look like the global, the global graph, it didn't, it wasn't increasing for 2000. That's one of the worrisome things that we found because you asked, why is there this increase? It's because all sorts of other countries are still increasing their freedom around the world. Not the United States. The United States is a very worrisome trend starting from around the year 2000 of a long-term steady decline in freedom that then with the global financial crisis, it accelerated. And we especially see that beginning in the year 2000 in the economic freedom side of things because of exactly the kinds of things that you mentioned. And out of the five different indicators in economic freedom, the broad categories that we look at, size of government, the legal system and property rights, sound money, freedom to trade and regulation, all of them saw notable drops during this period of time. Except that the rule of law indicator saw the biggest drop. It was a very big drop and that accelerated with the financial crisis, but that was already going on. And it really started with the beginning of the Bush administration. And we think that that's due to a lot of things, the wars, the war on terror, the war on drugs, the weakening of private property rights in the United States with the Kilo decision over a decade ago. I think that the financial crisis made things worse because there was a rise of crony capitalism or at least what people perceived as crony capitalism were industries and in fact, particular companies close to power got privileges and massive amounts of bailouts, even though that wasn't necessarily justified. And all of these things combined to weaken the rule of law because it's arbitrary and at the very least it's perceived as such. And when you have the rules of the game not viewed as fair, that's a real threat to other freedoms. But we did see other areas of freedom like government spending and monetary policy and freedom to trade start to go down as well. And this accelerated during the financial crisis, it started to recover some and with the pandemic it came down. Never did the United States recover its level of freedom that it had in the year 2000 when it used to rank at the top. Here's a breakdown of the analysis of the United States. As you mentioned, rule of law is at a meager 6.3 movement, 6.4 affected negatively by the pandemic of course, size of government, 6.8. What are some of the immediate steps that should be taken to reverse these trends and get the US at least back into the top 10 of freedom ranked countries? Well, I mean, there's a lot that can be done in terms of economic freedom. We're way below in economic freedom what we were in the year 2000 and that's in terms of free trade, in terms of regulations, in terms of sound money, and in every indicator we're below. And so all of those policies can be improved. The size of government is much larger today after Obama, after Trump, during the- After Bush, right? After Bush, it's just much larger than when Bush came in. If I may, in 2019, because this, when we talk about the COVID exception, 2019 spending, this was under Donald Trump and it was a record at the time, the federal budget spent for, or federal government spent $4.4 trillion. In 2020, it spent $6.6 trillion in 2021, 6.8. Last year, it went down to 6.3 slightly. This year, it's estimated to be 6.4. And this seems to vindicate the Higgs hypothesis of a kind of ratchet effect. So it's gone down from 6.8%, but it's much closer to that than it is to 4.4, which was already insane compared to Bill Clinton 20 years earlier. That's right. So I think that that hypothesis is still valid for the United States after these crises. And there were several crises during the Bush administration, which did help to increase government spending at a time, at least in the first part of his administration, where the Republicans controlled the Congress and the executive and that's oftentimes not a good thing. Yeah, and it's interesting now and not to get too into weeds about government spending in America, but when Obama came in in 2009, he of course, he won what was rightly considered a mandate at the time and the Democrats took, they had control of the House, but they took control of the Senate. He did have a blank check for two years and spending went up and they got everything they wanted basically and that elected a Republican Congress and then things started leveling off. I mean, I'm not a huge fan of divided government because it's at various points, it seems as if spending just keeps going up anyway, but at least in the late Bush years and the second half of Obama, things leveled off a bit because it seems a divided government put the brakes on certain speed. So behind all of these trends is how people view government and how people feel about society and politics and so on. And one of the things that we see is when you look at the global picture and you see the high point at 2007 and then it starts going down with the financial crisis, that's a period of time where you really see the rise of different forms of populism during this subsequent period of time all over the world, authoritarian populism of the left of the right and a lot of countries just taking over and then a lot of political systems having a bigger say in politics, including in liberal democracies has occurred in the United States. I would argue in both parties. What happened I think in the United States beginning during the Bush administration, which as I say had its own crises and expanded the role of government so it was reducing freedom is, if you look at the surveys by Pew and by Gallup, you see that over the past 15 to 20 years in the United States, trust in almost every institution in society starts coming down and it's hitting record lows on so many different institutions. We're talking about the media, Congress, the executive. Things like the Catholic church and philanthropies are actually also seeing a... These businesses, big businesses and other kinds of businesses. And so when there is a loss of trust in the main institutions in society that mediate interaction in society, you're in Latin American territory and that's when Trump came in. And I very much view Trump as a Latin American populist but I think that he didn't come out of nowhere. Something was going on in the United States that led people to think, hey, the rules of the game aren't fair anymore. We don't trust this institution or that institution. Yeah, and both he and Hillary Clinton, this was striking to me in the rhetoric in 2016, they both explicitly said the system is broken. They offered different reasons for why it was broken and what was broken in it and how they would fix it but it was fairly chilling. And I think on some profound level, accurate. I mean, certainly there's a reason why they were the candidates and they were both saying the system is broken. You can't trust the system. The system doesn't care about you. It's not watching out for you, et cetera. But of course, they took no responsibility for that system. Yeah, no, no, of course. They've been a part of it. I think that that's been a really big problem for, especially for the Democrats who have a lot of correct correct gripes about Republicans or Trump, they themselves have become at least a big part of the Democrats have become more radicalized but they don't take into account the role that their ideas had and continue to have in creating the political polarization. I very much see the political polarization in the United States and what's going on now as a legacy of Obama and even of Bush. So unfortunately, I don't think that there has been a great explanation so far analysis of why that has happened. And we can come up with a lot of plausible stories that I think can be compelling. But the fact of the matter is that this polarization and this rise of populisms either on the left or right or both has been going on all around the world in countries that are completely different from one another in terms of wealth, in terms of the political system, in terms of culture. I mean, we're talking about this happening in Mexico and Chile, two very different societies and in India and in Hungary. And the hardening of nationalisms and so on in Russia and in China, Turkey and in parts of Western Europe where major political parties have become radicalized or include very radical parties as part of their coalitions. Hey, thanks for watching that excerpt from our conversation with Ian Vasquez at the Cato Institute about the state of human freedom worldwide post COVID. 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