After more than $20 trillion in stimulus plans since 2020, the economy is going into stagnation with elevated inflation. Global governments announced more than $12 trillion in stimulus measures in 2020 alone, and central banks bloated their balance sheet by $8 trillion.

The result was disappointing and with long-lasting negative effects. Weak recovery, record debt, and elevated inflation. Of course, governments all over the world blamed the Ukraine invasion on the nonexistent multiplier effect of the stimulus plans, but the excuse made no sense.

Commodity prices rose from February to June 2022 and have corrected since. Even considering the negative effect of rising commodity prices in developed economies, we must acknowledge that those are positives for emerging economies and, even with that boost, the disappointing recovery led to constant downgrades of estimates.

If Keynesian multipliers existed, most developed economies would be growing strongly even discounting the Ukraine invasion impact, considering the unprecedented amount of stimulus plans approved.

Now we face a 2023 with even more disappointing estimates. According to Bloomberg economics, global growth will decline from a poor 3.2 percent in 2022 to a worrying 2.4 percent in 2023, significantly below the pre-covid-19 trend but with higher global debt. Total global debt rose by $3.3 trillion in Q1 2022 to a new record of over $305 trillion—mostly due to China and the US, according to the Institute of International Finance.

However, consensus estimates show an even worse outlook. Global growth should stall at +1.8 percent, with the euro area at zero growth and the United States at just 0.3 percent, with inflation reaching 6 percent globally, 6.1 percent in the euro area, and 4.1 percent in the United States.

Only a handful of countries are expected to reduce debt in 2023, with most nations continuing to finance bloated government spending with elevated deficits and tax hikes. A world where governments are constantly eroding the purchasing power of currencies and slashing disposable income of taxpayers with rising taxes is likely to show weaker growth trends and worsening imbalances.

The narrative all over the world is to try and convince us that past-peak but elevated inflation is “falling prices” and that everything is good when debt increases, growth stalls, and the purchasing power of salaries and savings is wiped out slowly.

There is no success in stagflation. It is a process of impoverishment that hurts the middle classes immensely while excessive government spending is never curbed.

Twenty twenty-two was the year that killed the science-fiction fallacy of modern monetary theory (MMT). Countries with monetary sovereignty like Japan or the UK found themselves in an unprecedented turmoil created by the illusion that rising deficit and debt would never cause significant problems. It only took a few rate hikes to dismantle the illusion of perennial money printing as the solution to everything.

Twenty twenty-two also showed that it is false that massive deficits are reserves that strengthen the economy. The United States suffered the most severe inflation blow in thirty years even being energy independent and benefitting from exporting natural gas and oil to the rest of the world. If the ludicrous MMT narrative was true, the United States should have not suffered any inflationary pressure.

Twenty twenty-three is expected to be the year of stagflation. Of course, most strategists are betting on inflation falling rapidly in the second part of the year, but that seems inconsistent with their estimates of deficit spending and growth.

The uncomfortable reality is that nations have created a long-lasting decline by pushing the limits on demand-side policies and government intervention.

Many celebrated the decision to use governments and central banks as the lenders of first resort instead of the last option, and what has been created is a problem with difficult solutions.

There seems to be no incentive to reduce the fiscal and monetary imbalances built through two decades, and therefore the result will be weaker growth and impoverishment.

No government wants to acknowledge the risk of central banks reducing their balance sheet. Even the most aggressive strategist fails to dare to estimate a three trillion US dollar quantitative tightening because they all know that the effects could be devastating. However, to truly normalize, central banks should reduce their balance sheet by at least five trillion US dollars. Governments and investment banks fear a gradual three trillion tightening because it can lead to a financial crisis. Those same market participants know that a five trillion tightening would undoubtedly lead to a financial crisis.

The reason why everyone expects a 2023 divided in two parts, a first half of poor data and a second where growth picks up and inflation plummets, is because market participants need to create a narrative that shows a quick fix to the above-mentioned disaster. However, there is no quick fix, there is no soft landing and there is not a chance of solving the problem by keeping elevated deficits, massive central bank balance sheets and real negative rates. If we want to look at the options, there are only two: Fixing the problem created in 2020, which means a global recession but probably not a financial crisis, or not fixing it, which means elevated inflation, weaker growth, and another bad year for risky assets which can lead to a financial crisis.

Unfortunately, when governments all over the world decided to “spend now and deal with the consequences later” in 2020 they also created the seeds of a 2008-style problem.

By the beginning of the fourth century, the Roman Empire had become a completely different economic reality from what it had been at the beginning of the first century. The denarius argenteus, the empire’s monetary unit during the first two centuries, had virtually disappeared since the middle of the third century, having been replaced by the argenteus antoninianus and the argenteus aurelianianus, numerals of greater theoretical value, but of less and less real value.

The public excesses in the civil and military budgets, the incessant bribes and gifts, the repeated tax increases, the growth of the state bureaucracy, and the continuous requisitions of goods and precious metals had exhausted the Roman economy to incredible levels. To cap this disastrous reality, inflation had risen from 0.7 percent per year in the first and second centuries to 35.0 percent per year in the late third and early fourth centuries, impoverishing all social strata of the empire by leaps and bounds.

In 301, Diocletian sought to put an end to this out-of-control situation by promulgating the Edictum de pretiis rerum venalium (Edict Concerning the Prices of Goods for Sale), which prohibited, on pain of death, the raising of prices above a certain level for almost thirteen hundred essential products and services. In the preamble to the edict, economic agents were blamed for inflation, labeled as speculators and thieves, and compared to the barbarians who threatened the empire.

Most producers and intermediaries, therefore, opted to stop trading the goods they produced, to sell them on the black market, or even to use barter for commercial transactions. This weakening of supply drove real prices even higher, in an upward spiral that further deteriorated the complex Roman economic system. Just four years later, in 305, Diocletian himself, overwhelmed by his political and economic failures, abdicated in Nicomedia and retired to his palace in what is today Split, Croatia.

A year after Diocletian’s abdication, a young Constantine, son of the tetrarch Constantius Chlorus, was proclaimed emperor by his troops at Eburacum, now York, England. Six years later, in 312, he took control of the West and then, in 324, also of the East, reunifying the empire once again under his rule. Considered the new Augustus, Constantine, like the first emperor, carried out an ambitious and far-reaching monetary system reform. In 310, he created a new solidus, lowering its weight to 4.5 grams and titling it 96–99 percent pure gold. This coin became the new centerpiece of the later Roman Empire’s monetary system, replacing the devalued silver numerals of the past.

The Constantinian solidus became the official unit for prices and accounts, and new taxes were levied exclusively in this currency. Thus, thanks to the confiscation of key gold reserves hoarded in pagan temples, which had become unprotected by the Roman state, the real value of this new currency, issued in large quantities, could be maintained, to the extent that it served as a haven in the Byzantine Empire until the eleventh century.

Alongside the solidus, Constantine also created two other gold numeraires in 324: the semis, weighing 2.25 grams and with a 96–99 percent title, and another coin weighing 1.7 grams at 96–99 percent pure gold. The system was completed both by three new supposedly “silver” coins—the heavy miliarensis (5.45 grams), the light miliarensis (4.50 grams), and the siliqua or argenteus (3.40 grams)—and by two more silver-plated bronze coins—the nummus (3.40 grams) and the centenionalis (between 2.70 and 1.70 grams).

However, these “silver” and bronze denominations were minted in enormous quantities and were continually devalued over the years, to the detriment of their most common users, the middle and lower social classes. The gold coins, however, used by the Roman state and the higher social classes, retained their original title and weight throughout. In this way, Constantine established gold monometallism for the first time in Roman history.

The death of Constantine in 337 and the subsequent division of the empire among his sons Constantine II, Constans, and Constantius II did not radically change the monetary system, but it did cause the “silver” and bronze numerals to be altered again: in 348, there appeared a new coin of 5.0 grams bronze and 2.5 percent silver, called pecunia maiorina by the Theodosian Code, as well as two others of 4.0 and 2.5 grams bronze and 1.0 and 0.1 percent silver, respectively. In 355, a new coin of 9.0 grams of bronze and 2.0 percent of silver appeared, called AE 1 by the specialists, while the siliqua was reduced in weight to 2.0 grams of “silver.”

The last great monetary reform of the empire was enacted by Valentinian I and Valens around 368. Gold was established as the stable axis of the later Roman Empire’s monetary system. Both the solidus and the semis reached a title of 99 percent pure gold. After the death of the two emperors, the system incorporated the tremis, at 1.5 grams of gold. This coin achieved great popularity and diffusion in the following decades.

This stabilization of the weight and grammage of gold numerals, the various reforms against corruption in the bureaucracy, a constant program of tax increases, and the withdrawal of excess liabilities still circulating in the empire all helped considerably to slow down inflation on an annual basis. However, this control of the gold numeraires did not apply to the rest of the “silver” and bronze systems. The siliqua, for example, was increasingly downgraded to 1.14 grams of “silver” and became an increasingly rare coin, while the newly created AE 1 lost virtually all of its precious metal content and the custom of silver-plating bronze coins was abandoned forever.

This monetary system remained largely unchanged until the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 and until the reforms of Anastasius in the East in 498. The gold monometallism of Constantine, on the other hand, survived until the last decades of the eighth century, when Charlemagne replaced it with an argent monometallism.

During the fourth and fifth centuries, the Roman economy finally deteriorated completely, taking with it society and, consequently, the ambitions of the politicians of the time. The Roman Empire was now a failed and outdated project. The persistent excess of public spending between the first and third centuries forced Roman rulers to devalue the currency continuously. This chronic devaluation, together with the decline in population and economic activity throughout the third century, triggered price inflation throughout the empire, a phenomenon that the Romans did not know how to handle.

Roman rulers attempted to use harmful price controls in order to mitigate the decline in the effective purchasing power of the middle and lower classes. For instance, the Edictum de pretiis rerum venalium of 301 ended up withdrawing what little supply of products remained on the white market, making them more expensive on the black market. It is truly shocking to note how many politicians and populist parties of all ideological stripes continue to propose these same “remedies” even today.

At the same time, the Roman emperors created a rigid system of taxes based on payments in kind to guarantee some annual income of the state. These public requisitions restricted the free supply of goods in the common market and thus impoverished artisans and merchants throughout the empire. To guarantee the tax revenue, Roman rulers prevented peasants and professionals from leaving their originally registered domiciles and activities, thereby creating hereditary castes of workers and preventing productive factors and capital from flowing to the sectors most in need of labor and capital investment.

To put an end to the galloping inflation, Constantine established a golden monometallism by controlling the weight, dimensions, and title of the different gold numerals. The tight control of the production of gold coins curbed the escalation of prices and eased the strains on the state’s accounts. Similarly, some countries today choose to combat the inflation of their currencies by dollarizing their economies, as in the recent case of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela.

However, the remaining silver and bronze numerals—the ones most used by the middle and lower classes—were left at the mercy of unyielding inflation, causing poverty and the continuous decapitalization of the poorest classes in the Roman Empire. As a result, numerous local currencies were minted, different from place to place and all of them of poor quality, while barter or exchange in kind was increasingly favored. This discouraged long-distance trade and large-scale industrial production, increasingly turning the different areas of the empire into local subsistence economies. City dwellers, overwhelmed by excessive tax burdens and lack of work, increasingly moved to the countryside, where the economy was organized in luxurious rustic villas, which gradually became castles.

Taken together, the aggregate effects of public overspending and inflation on the Roman economy in between the first and third centuries ultimately led to an unprecedented structural weakening of the economic capacity of fourth- and fifth-century society, reflected in the incompetence of its rulers and elites to hold the empire together in the face of external threats, which, to quote Ludwig von Mises himself, “were not more formidable than the armies which the legions had easily defeated in earlier times. But the Empire had changed. Its economic and social structure was already medieval.”

Southwest Airlines experience an enormous meltdown over the Christmas holiday week last month, cancelling thousands of flights, and losing track of—or outright losing—countless pieces of luggage. The airline was full of excuses, of course. As has become fashionable for government and corporate screw-ups, airline management attempted to blame covid for staffing problems. Southwest also blamed the weather. It’s amazing they didn’t also try to somehow blame “Russia’s war in Ukraine“—as the stock phrase now goes—as well. 

Yet, no other major airline had nearly the troubles that Southwest had in terms of either weather delays or staffing problems. Rather, the operational problems apparently stem from the fact that Southwest couldn’t be bothered with spending money to improve its own operating capabilities over the past decade. This occurred in spite of the fact that Southwest—like other major US airlines—collected billions of dollars in bailout funds. The company then reported large profits thanks in part to the funds stolen from taxpayers. 

Already, we’re hearing about lawsuits from paying customers, and fines from federal regulators. The only real solution, however—in addition to civil suits to recover real damages—lies in forcing Southwest to submit to more market competition. In addition to periodic bailouts from taxpayers, Southwest—like all US airlines—is protected from foreign competition by protectionist US laws. Combining these protections with bailouts—airlines got free money in both 2001 and 2020—we have an airline industry that’s complacent, wasteful, and prone to mistreating its customers. 

Mask Mandates and Southwest’s Mistreatment of its own Customers 

As stranded customers sought to reschedule their flights at the Nashville airport las week, Southwest employees called in the police to threaten customers with arrest if they didn’t immediately leave the area. The airline later claimed they were merely trying to “help” customers contact reservation agents elsewhere in the airport.

Resorting to police coercion, of course, is a tactic we’ve seen employed by airline employees on many occasions. Perhaps, most famously, United Airlines employees in 2017 called in police to beat up a paid customer, David Dao, who refused to give up his seat on a flight after airline employees mismanaged booking. Some conservatives rushed to defend the airline, even claiming that United Airlines was the victim, or insisting that the passenger should have just meekly followed orders.

That case became an interesting prelude to the debate over “following orders” from airline employees in light of covid mask mandates. Three years later, airlines rushed to unilaterally adopt covid mask mandates for customers, forcibly removing customers who didn’t comply with every minute detail.

This was done without federal mandates, mind you. In April of 2020, private airlines began imposing their own mask mandates, and airlines were free to adopt—or not adopt— their own mask policies well into 2021. Southwest was happy to jump on the mask bandwagon early, however, and adopted a mask policy even more stringent than those policies imposed by many governments. In Colorado, for example, the government-imposed mask mandate applied only to children 11 years of age, or older. Southwest, on the other hand, saw fit to impose a mask mandate on children as young as two years old. There was absolutely no scientific basis for this, of course, but Southwest enthusiastically enforced the mandate, even tightening restrictions in the summer of 2020. The airline stated that even those with verifiable medical conditions preventing masking would not be allowed to fly at all.

Airline employees proceeded to throw an autistic 3-year old and his family off a plane in one case. On another occasion a Southwest flight attendant booted a 2-year old and his mother because the small child was taking too long to eat his gummy bears. Although the mask policy was only private corporate policy at that time, Southwest’s stated policy was that customers not be given much leeway to eat: “we expect these instances to be very brief, and customers should put their face covering back on as soon as possible.”

Southwest Gets Billions in Taxpayer Money 

At the same time Southwest was voluntarily throwing toddlers off planes for eating incorrectly, it was receiving billions in taxpayer money as part of the federal government’s bailout of US airlines. This was the second bailout for Southwest in twenty years, an earlier bailout having come in 2001. In the 2020 bailout, Southwest received $7 billion in subsidized loans, grants, and tax relief:

On April 14, Southwest announced that it had reached an agreement with the government in which it will receive $2.3 billion in grants, as well as a $1 billion low-interest loan backed by warrants that could dilute Southwest shareholders only minimally, even if fully exercised.

Months later, in April 2021, Southwest announced $116 billion in profits. According to the Chicago Tribune, this was largely attributable to the infusion of taxpayer money handed over to Southwest: “Without the federal money, Southwest would have lost $1 billion in the quarter.”

This doesn’t distinguish Southwest from other major US airlines, of course. Those airlines received bailouts as well. Yet, in spite of its net revenues, Southwest did very little to address the problems of scheduling flights which it knew could lead to mass flight cancellations. Southwest’s passengers were victimized twice: once when their hard-earned money was stolen by the state to pay for Southwest’s bailout, and a second time when Southwest stranded thousands of taxpayers on Christmas. 

How Governments Limit Airline Competition

It is likely that last week many thousands of Southwest customers declared “I’ll never fly southwest again.” Such declarations have a way of being short-lived when passengers enjoy few alternatives.

Unfortunately, thanks to costs imposed by federal regulations, and by federal protectionism, American airline passengers don’t have as many alternatives as they should.  There were no new-entrant airlines from 2007 to 2021, and a small number of firms dominate the airline business in North America. Investopedia claims the three top carriers enjoy 70 percent of the business, and Salon and the NYT say the top four enjoy 80 percent. 

Governments limit competition in several ways, including: 

Air traffic control is a monopoly run by the FAA and services are limited by political considerations. Airports are owned by local governments, and thus allocate airport amenities and services according to political needs and not market needs. The FAA rations “slots” which give “an airline the right to either takeoff or land at the airport in a specified time period, and airlines [can] only access the airport with a slot. These slots are generally distributed to the largest and most powerful incumbent firms. 

Moreover, the generally-high level of bureaucratization in the airline business means that airlines spend a sizable amount of effort satisfying government bureaucracies rather than concentrating on their own customers. As Per Bylund has explained, regulated markets destroy consumer sovereignty. 

So, yes, there are multiple government-imposed constraints that indirectly limit competition in the airline industry—to the benefit of incumbent firms like Southwest.

The Ban on Domestic Routes for Foreign Carriers

But there is also one big government regulation that directly protects all domestic airlines from competition: the US ban on foreign carriers. USAToday reports: 

International airlines do operate in this country, of course, but they’re forbidden from flying point-to-point destinations domestically. These laws, which are meant to protect American consumers and jobs, are having the exact opposite effect. Eliminating — or at least partially lifting — outdated restrictions could significantly increase competition and improve customer service.

The author of the above is wrong about at least one thing. The protectionist laws eliminating foreign competition are not “outdated.” They were never a good idea to begin with. Protectionist laws such as the ban on foreign carriers have always favored the owners of domestic firms at the expense of their customers. 

Were free trade allowed in the airline business, customers could potentially elect to fly the Irish carrier Aer Lingus — for example — between Dallas and Chicago rather than Southwest. This would, of course, drive down prices and give more choices to consumers. 

Southwest’s debacle has shown just how much more competition is needed. 

Commentators worry that the United States might lose its dominance in innovation to Asian countries like China and Singapore. Many policymakers are intimidated by the R&D budgets of Asian countries and by their superior performance on international academic assessments. However, these concerns are misguided because the United States still dominates innovation.

The United States ranks second on the Global Innovation Index and scores the highest in the world on fifteen of eighty-one innovation indicators. The US innovation ecosystem continues to lead in the commercialization of research, and its universities are on the cutting edge of academic research. Other countries are expanding research budgets, but the United States’ genius is its ability to commercialize relevant innovations.

Innovations are only useful when they disrupt industries by transforming society and altering consumer preferences. Because innovations respond to market changes, anything can become an innovation, and the process is highly spontaneous. Unfortunately, too many countries are laboring under the assumption that government plans inevitably lead to innovation. Finding the next game changer is tremendously difficult due to the dynamism of consumer preferences.

US entrepreneurs appreciate that innovation is a freewheeling process rather than an object of grand design. That is why Silicon Valley, with its reverence for risk and failure, has been known for innovation. In her 2014 book, The Upside of Down: Why Failing Well is the Key to Success, Megan McArdle argues that the United States’ tolerance toward failure is a crucial pillar of prosperity because it promotes self-actualization, risk, and the continuous quest for innovation.

The United States’ rivals have eloquent five-year plans and extravagant budgets, but US innovation is undergirded by private institutions with a strong appetite for risk and iconoclastic thinking. Private venture-capital associations and research institutions searching for future pioneers are the primary players in US innovation. Government innovation plans are inherently conservative because they hinge on the success of targeted industries.

But, in the private sector, entrepreneurs are deliberately scouting for disruptors to undercut traditional industries by launching breakthrough products. The conformity of government bureaucracies is an enemy of the unorthodox thinking that spurs innovation. China is known for having a competent and meritocratic civil service, yet scholars contend that it lacks an innovative environment.

A key problem is that China focuses on competing with western rivals instead of developing new industries; innovation is perceived as a competition between China and its rivals rather than an activity pursued for its own sake. Consequently, US companies remain market leaders and are more adept at converting market information into innovative products than their Chinese counterparts. Unlike China, US entrepreneurship is not a function of geopolitics.

Meanwhile, some commentators suggest that the US education system is better at deploying talent due to its encouragement of unorthodox thinking. In contrast, Singapore and China have been criticized for emphasizing rote learning at the expense of critical thinking. For example, Singapore’s public sector is a model of excellence; however, despite government support, Singapore is yet to become an innovation hotbed.

Bryan Cheung, in an assessment of industrial policy in Singapore, comments on the failure of Singapore to translate research into innovation: “Even though Singapore ranks highly on global innovation indices, closer scrutiny reveals that it scores poorly on the sub-component of innovation efficiency.” A recent edition of the Global Innovation Index, using a global comparison, declared that “Singapore produces less innovation outputs relative to its level of innovation investments.”

Cheung explains that Singapore is heavily reliant on foreign talent to boost innovation: “Even the six ‘unicorns’ that Singapore has produced (Grab, SEA, Trax, Lazada, Patsnap, Razer) were all founded or co-founded by foreign entrepreneurs. In the Start-Up Genome (2021), Singapore also performed relatively poorly in ‘quality and access’ to tech talent, research impact of publications, and local market reach, which is unsurprising since innovation activity is concentrated in foreign hands.”

Asian countries are growing more competitive, but it will take decades before they develop the United States’ appetite for risk, market-driven innovations, and the uncanny ability to monetize anything. The United States’ spectacular economic performance and business acumen are based on its unique culture. Those who bet against the United States by downplaying its culture are bound to lose. The United States’ rivals are still catching up.

After the 2008 financial crisis, calls rang out across establishment publications and the executive offices of Wall Street that we were witnessing the death of globalization. The calls grew louder and more numerous after Brexit, the election of Donald Trump, the pandemic, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Yet the data appears to dispute this narrative. Global trade hit a record $28.5 trillion last year with projections to grow in 2023. The pace, however, is expected to slow. The reason for this is less a problem with globalization itself and more the historic setbacks that globalism has faced.

Before continuing, it is important to define some terms. Globalization occurs when societies around the world begin to interact and integrate economically and politically. The intercontinental trade experienced during the Age of Sail and via the Silk Road are early examples of globalization. Globalization really took off after World War II and received a recent boost with the widespread adoption of the internet. Importantly, globalization in common discourse includes both the voluntary economic activities between peoples of different nations and the involuntary geopolitical activities of governments.

In contrast, Ian Bremmer defines globalism as an ideology that calls for top-down trade liberalization and global integration backed by a unipolar power. Statists believe that market exchange between people is literally impossible without government; only when a group claims a legal monopoly on violence and then builds infrastructure, provides security, documents property titles, and serves as the final arbiter of disputes can a market come into existence. Globalism is the application of this perspective to international trade. Globalists believe that top-down global governance enforced and secured by a unipolar superpower enables globalization.

But, like statists on a more local scale, the globalist view is logically and historically flawed. Global trade was well underway before the first major attempt at global governance, the League of Nations, in 1919. The league’s stated aim was to ensure peace and justice for all nations of the world through collective security. Falling apart at the outset of World War II, it failed miserably. But globalism as an ideology found its footing after the war. Europe was devastated. This left the US and the USSR as the only two countries with the ability to exert power globally.

So began the fastest era of globalization in history. Trade exploded as people moved on from the war. The globalist project also got off the ground with the founding of the United Nations and the World Bank. Globalism was limited only by the ideological differences between the two superpowers. The USSR wanted to support revolutions while the US aimed for top-down trade liberalization—which drove the recent allies apart and plunged the world into the Cold War.

In the United States, the neoliberals and neoconservatives dominated the political mainstream through their shared mission to bring markets and democracy to the world at gunpoint and financed by US taxpayers. Fortunately for them, the rate at which their interventions at home and abroad were wrecking US society was slower than that of the Soviets. The abolition of prices and private property eventually led to the collapse of the USSR in the early 1990s. With its main adversary defeated, the United States had achieved one of the central tenets of globalism, unipolarity.

From the outset, the US establishment gorged itself on its new globe-spanning influence. Through new international organizations like the World Trade Organization, “free trade” agreements were introduced. Some ran for hundreds of pages, yet all free trade really requires is an absence of policy. The United States sailed its navy around the world’s oceans promising to secure shipping lanes like a global highway patrolman. Through the promise of US military security and the bankrolling of international governance organizations, US taxpayers were forced to subsidize global trade.

As Murray Rothbard highlights in Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, there is no such thing as international trade in a truly free market. Nations would still exist, but they would be pockets of culture instead of economic units. Any state restrictions on trade between people based on location are a violation of their liberty and a cost to society. Most free-market economists understand this and advocate against state restrictions accordingly. But subsidies to international trade are also antithetical to the free market. The proper free-market position is the complete absence of policy on both sides. No restrictions and no subsidies. Let people freely choose who they do business with. There should be no hand on either end of the scale.

Economic integration was far from the only focus of the US regime during its unipolar moment. Too many people had gained wealth, power, and status during the Cold War as part of the US war-making class. Despite the USSR’s total collapse, the last thing the United States wanted to do was declare victory and give up its privileged position. Instead, the United States scrambled to find a new enemy to justify the continuation of those privileges. Their eyes settled on the Middle East where they would, in time, launch eight unessential wars that killed any notion of a “rules-based international order.” US unipolarity proved Albert Jay Nock correct; governments are only as peaceful as they are weak.

This institutional desire for war would sow the seeds of destruction for the United States’ unipolar moment. As the United States eviscerated any notion that it stood for a rules-based order through its adventurism in the Middle East, tension was brewing in Eastern Europe and East Asia. To the doubtless joy of weapons companies and foreign policy elites, the Russian and Chinese governments were transformed back into the United States’ enemies.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine in February was a huge win for the US war machine, but it also represented an enormous step backward for globalism. The Russians seceded from the global order the United States had led for three decades. The West’s reaction, grounded in strict sanctions and forced economic divestment, deepened the rift in the global system.

What the future holds is anyone’s guess, but the globalist dream of a singular system of global governance is surely wrecked for the near future as the Russo-Chinese bloc breaks away. There will be pain because so many connections between nations are controlled by governments; however, a significant degree of globalization is still valued by the world’s consumers. The data contradicts any idea that globalization is reversing. It is only slowing as governments attempt to drag consumers along on their quest to divest from the other side.

Despite the claims that globalization is dead, international trade is alive and well. But the drive toward an interconnected world is slowing down as the ideology of globalism experiences its biggest setback in decades. The statist conflation of unipolar global governance and international trade explains where these claims are coming from and why they are flawed.

While “private policing” is in many people’s minds a feature of dystopian science fiction or the fantasies of libertarian economists, the reality is that private security is far more common than most think. Indeed, as Georgetown professor John Hasnas points out, it is all around us. Unfortunately, the impetus for much of the growth in the private security industry has been the inadequacies of state-provided protection.

An example of this phenomenon is JNS Protection Services, which recently garnered attention in the Philadelphia Inquirer. JNS provides a variety of security services in Georgia and Pennsylvania, including North Philadelphia, where Temple University is located.

Temple Students living off campus fear for their safety. This is understandable, considering the amount of crime North Philadelphia is experiencing. On November 28, 2021, Temple senior Samuel Collington was fatally shot in a parking lot near campus during what appears to have been an attempted robbery. Less than two weeks earlier, on November 16, high school senior Ahmir Jones was also killed during a robbery attempt just blocks from Temple. In 2021, Philadelphia as a whole surpassed its murder record; the previous peak of over five hundred murders annually was during the crack cocaine epidemic of the early 1990s.

After a broad-daylight armed robbery took place outside one student’s residence, his mother decided to hire JNS to patrol his neighborhood. Although JNS was initially hired to patrol the area three days per week, the plan came to the attention of a Facebook group of Temple parents, and they contributed funds to expand the service to five days per week.

An opinion column detailing the events included a former Philadelphia police officer’s views on parents’ move to hire private security:

“They’re just a town watch,” pointed out David Fisher, a retired Philadelphia police officer and president of the National Black Police Association, Greater Philadelphia chapter. “They are more eyes and ears on the streets that they’re patrolling. It’s good. But will it be effective? I’m not sure.”

While we would not expect Fisher to apologize on behalf the Philadelphia Police Department for failing to maintain public safety to such an extent that the parents of students at a premier research university feel the need to hire private security, his condescending attitude is notable for two reasons.

The first is that it provides further evidence suggesting that, despite the rhetoric and billions spent on community-oriented policing (COP), a significant contingent of police officers never bought into it and its emphasis on police-community partnerships. Rather, COP became popular among police departments mainly because of the gibs being handed out by the Department of Justice. Instead of being a vital component in the production of public safety, nonpolice are “just a town watch” who are, at best, “more eyes and ears on the streets” that can be useful to the real police.

The second reason is that while Fisher expressed concerns over whether private security will be effective, the Philadelphia Police Department is able to escape such scrutiny despite the record number of murders and students being killed by armed robbers. In contrast to JNS Protection Services, the city police do not have to demonstrate their effectiveness to Philadelphians in order to get paid. Local (as well as US) taxpayers will continue to fund them regardless.

Perhaps parents will find that JNS’s services are ineffective or unsatisfactory. Perhaps a competitor will provide a better service at a lower price. But just as school choice creates financial incentives for public schools that give parents more control, security providers are more responsive when parents have police choice.