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| How can societies safeguard liberty in a world reshaped by new technologies, shifting economic power, and the rise of competing global actors—and what understanding is needed to recognize emerging challenges and strengthen the principles that sustain freedom across nations? |
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| “Technological innovation makes human societies prosperous, but also involves the replacement of the old with the new, and the destruction of the economic privileges and political power of certain people.” — Daron Acemoğlu |
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| This week’s featured pieces center on how liberty emerges, adapts, and survives in a world where political, technological, and cultural forces are rapidly shifting. Together, they highlight how global freedom is being repositioned today—shaped by new power dynamics, evolving institutions, and the pressures of a changing international landscape. Each selection offers a different perspective on the challenges and opportunities facing free societies to illuminate how the principles of liberty endure even as the conditions surrounding them transform. |
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| Helen Dale, A Call to Liberty
By examining Australia’s journey to federation and its uniquely blended constitutional design, the piece shows how British precedents, American ideas, and local political realities combined to create a system that elevates democratic majorities while adapting inherited concepts of governance. It highlights how Australia’s institutions developed through debate, compromise, and selective borrowing, resulting in a constitutional order that reflects both its historical roots and its evolving place in the wider world. |
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| John O. McGinnis, Law & Liberty
Across much of the world, classical liberalism is losing ground as governments embrace more expansive state roles and move away from long-held commitments to open markets and individual freedom. This analysis traces those shifts in the United States and abroad, from new economic and regulatory agendas to the tightening of political control in key regions. In doing so, it offers a clear view of how changing priorities and rising collective demands are reshaping the space that liberty once occupied.
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| Richard B. McKenzie, EconLib
As China moved from a closed communist system into the global market, rising competition reshaped American wages, inequality, and confidence in capitalism in ways often mistaken for homegrown problems. This essay shows how these global shifts in economic freedom influenced US workers and politics, reshaping debates about what capitalism can and should deliver.
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| Samuel Gregg, Law & Liberty
This article examines Capitalism: Histories, a new collection of essays that traces how different forms of capitalism emerged, evolved, and spread far beyond their Western origins. By comparing economic systems across regions as varied as Africa, Japan, India, Russia, and Southeast Asia, the book highlights how cultural forces, historical encounters, and institutional choices have shaped multiple “capitalisms” rather than a single, uniform model underscoring how economic freedom, like political liberty, takes different forms across the globe.
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| Walter Donway, Adam Smith Works
The long-running debates over monopoly, trade, and corporate power that followed the rise and dissolution of the British East India Company served to shape emerging ideas about what makes a country and the relationship between commerce and the state. This piece shows, through figures like Adam Smith, how these arguments exposed tensions between private profit and public responsibility and generated new thinking about taxation, trade, and economic power. |
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| Liberty Fund
Jack P. Greene discusses the Pamphlet Project, explaining how this collection of eighteenth-century colonial writings reveals the constitutional debates and evolving ideas of liberty across the British Atlantic world. His reflections show that these pamphlets illuminate a broader, global pursuit of liberty that extends well beyond any single nation’s narrative. |
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