A More Perfect Union

Freedom begins where permission ends.

A free man should not have to ask power how to live. He should not begin with, “Am I allowed?” He should begin with, “Am I harming anyone else?” If not, the burden should fall on the state to explain why it must interfere.

That does not mean no rules. A free society still has laws. But law should stop force, fraud, theft, and coercion. It should not crowd ordinary life. In a free country, permission is not the default.

Freedom is not just about voting. It includes speech, privacy, religion, association, property, enterprise, movement, and the right to make choices that elites dislike. It also means not living under arbitrary power. It is not enough that power is lawful on paper. If officials, regulators, platforms, or agencies can reach into your life whenever they choose, then you are not fully free, even if the whole system looks polite and civilized.

Freedom should not be confused with comfort. It is not safety. It is not equality of outcome. It is not good intentions. It is not being well run. It is not merely having elections.

That last point matters. A society can vote and still be unfree if more and more of life is controlled by distant institutions, rigid rules, and authorities the ordinary person cannot resist.

Freedom is the right, and the practical ability, to live by your own judgment without prior restraint or arbitrary interference, so long as you do not infringe the equal rights of others.

The opposite of freedom is not only tyranny by one man. It is also rule by system, where life is managed by institutions too distant, too entrenched, and too sure of their own right to decide for everyone else.

That is my dispute with Europe.

That is not to say Europe is a tyranny. Of course it is not. But it is not as free as it should be.

It is civilized. It is beautiful. It has order, strong public institutions, and a serious wish to prevent the worst brutalities of history from returning. These are real strengths.

But freedom is not comfort. It is not tidiness. It is not even safety. A society can be orderly, decent, and peaceful, and still leave its citizens with less room to speak, build, hire, fire, invent, and live without permission. That is the real dispute. China may be clean and comfortable, but it is not free. Iran may have free healthcare and beautiful cities, but it is not free. Welfare does not prove freedom. Welfare produces a managed society.

The problem with Europe is not that it has one supreme ruler. The problem is almost the reverse. Europe is ruled by a system. Power is spread across commissions, ministries, regulators, courts, and agencies that are lawful but remote. The European Commission is not directly elected by the public. The European Council proposes the Commission President, the Parliament approves, and the Commissioners are nominated by member states and then approved as a body. That arrangement may be constitutional, but it puts distance between the citizen and the force that governs him.

There is no single tyrant. There is no supreme leader. There is no personality cult.

There is something colder than that.

There is a machine.

A self-perpetuating bureaucratic machine that thinks in regulations, speaks in directives, and measures progress by the amount of compliance it produces.

The machine has no face, so it has no accountability.

It has no ego, so it has no shame.

It cannot be voted out, because it was never voted in.

This machine as a result shows up in ordinary life as well.

For instance, europe bans far more speech. Much of it falls under hate speech law. Some of the people who say these things would hate me for who I am. I would still rather they speak. First, because freedom means little unless it protects speech you dislike. Second, because a fool is easier to judge when he speaks in daylight. In Europe, the instinct is too often to regulate speech rather than defeat it in the open.

In America, by contrast, you can walk through Chinatown in San Francisco and see people say things that would horrify half the political class in Europe, including open sympathy for the Chinese Communist Party, and they are still allowed to say them. That is beautiful. It means the citizen still owns his voice.

A company like Anthropic can take the government into court, and the institutions will hear the case. The courts have heard such cases before and will hear them again.

This is one reason I love America. It admits in its founding words that it is unfinished. The Constitution speaks of forming “a more perfect Union.” Not a perfect union. A more perfect one. That is wise. It says the country is flawed, but capable of repair. It leaves room for error, correction, argument, and growth.

Of course America is not perfect. It can be cruel to poor people. It can produce bad leaders every now and then. But it was built on the idea that power must be checked because power cannot be trusted. The branches are set against each other on purpose. The legislature checks the executive. The judiciary checks both. Most of all, the people can vote leaders out.

The Founding Fathers were right about something large and hard. Freedom survives only when the state is broken up, watched, resisted, and forced to justify itself.

I love Europe. It is the most ambitious political experiment in human history. Take a continent that spent centuries drowning in its own blood, through two world wars, the Holocaust, colonialism, communism, and the Cold War, and turn it into a place with one economic zone and open borders. Those are great achievements.

But Europe has drifted from its roots.

The far right is extreme, fractious, and hostile to minorities. Brexit, Le Pen, Hungary.

The left has drifted into cancel culture.

Both sides have moved away from liberty and toward administration.

That is because europe now prefers managed outcomes, supervised systems, and rule by remote consensus.

For example, in France public life need to be administered this is shown in the ban that students in public schools are banned from wearing any clothing or signs that show religious affiliation. This has come from a government that increasingly wants to manage how the individual lives their personal life (even if it does not affect anyone else’s right).

There is another thing, and it is deeply American. You can go to Italy and spend your whole life there, and you may still never truly be seen as Italian. You can go to France or Turkey and live there for decades, and you may still never be French or Turkish. Even if you get citizenship, as I did in the United Kingdom, you are often not fully seen as British. But in America, you can come and truly become American. When you earn citizenship, you are American. Fully. That, to me, is one of the most beautiful things about this country. It is so free that anyone can join it and help build it.

America was built in revolt against inherited rank. The Constitution bars titles of nobility. In Britain, hereditary peers still sit in the House of Lords. America was founded as an open rejection of formal hereditary status.

Europe doesn’t just restrict the freedom of its citizens but also of enterprises. .Its instinct is to regulate first and scale second. One example is its urge to regulate AI before the industry had even properly taken off.

Another is the decision to force all companies to use USB-C. Europeans cheer this by default. But ask a simple question. What if we had frozen one charger standard in 2004? We would have locked ourselves into old cables and blocked later improvements. Companies do not need bureaucrats who think they know how to run them better. If a company makes bad decisions, it fails. The weak die. Better firms take their place. The consumer wins.

There is a broader instinct behind this. Europe often wants the state to oversee even the hidden workings of technology. It shows up in debates over encryption, platform control, and what governments may compel private companies to do. That is the logic of a managed society. The state must see everything. The state must supervise everything.

My case is not that Europe is a prison. It is not.

But lately it has drifted from liberty toward administration.

Europe should stop being ruled by bureaucratic instinct. It should become freer and move away from the managed society it keeps building. The state should be smaller. It has shown that it cannot manage an ageing population well, protect free speech with confidence, or produce strong economic growth. People should be free to do what they wish, say what they want, start what they want, live as they like, and worship as they need.

For all my complaints, Europe is my home. It is where I grew up. It is where my family lives. It helped give me a good childhood and a good education. But I know Europe can do more. It can be freer. It can cut regulation.Improve healthcare. Build great companies. Innovate. And most importantly stop treating the citizen as a problem to be managed. Right now, though, it is too closed-minded.

The people should have more room to speak, build, start companies, worship, take risks, and live as they judge best

This, in the end, is why I think America remains the freest place on earth.

Not because it is gentler.

Not because it is cleaner or more beautiful.

Not because it is more orderly

And not because every American institution lives up to its own promise. It plainly does not.

America is the freest place because its first principle is still better. It still holds, deep in its bones, that the citizen is not a subject. That speech belongs to the people. That rank should not be inherited. That power should be split because power cannot be trusted. That a man may come from anywhere and become fully part of the nation. That enterprise should breathe. That the state must justify its reach

Europe has beauty, peace, learning, and grace. But modern Europe too often mistakes being well managed for being free. It trusts the rulebook more than judgment, the office more than the citizen, and the system more than the soul.

America, at its best, still asks the better question.

By what right?