Autocrats trying to close the global commons

Created
Wed, 15/03/2023 - 00:00
Updated
Wed, 15/03/2023 - 00:00
Time to restore U.S. shipbuilding? The Taxes-are-Theft crowd are the Makers-and-Takers crowd are Entitlement-Reform crowd are the Government-Never-Created-a-Job crowd. Somehow, 25 percent of U.S. food grown on an inland desert just gets watered and manifests in the local supermarket (along with foreign produce; we’ll get to that). Somehow, the national system of interstate highways over which they travel just appeared overnight. Somehow, water appears out of their taps and what they shit disappears just as magically. Entitlement? There’s a whole lot goin’ ’round. We used to call it taking things for granted. Like bank deposits being safe. Sen. Elizabeth Warren Monday night reminded Rachel Maddow’s viewers how banking should work. It should be boring. Something that, like those other things, we hardly notice. That was the point of Michael Lewis’ “The Fifth Risk.” When government works as it should, it’s almost unnoticeable. We take it for granted. We don’t know a fraction of what it does. On that, retired Navy captain Jerry Hendrix reminds The Atlantic readers how much of global trade depends on freedom of the seas. That didn’t just happen either. In our lifetime, Hendrix writes, freedom of the seas “has seemed like a default condition, it is easy to think of it—if we think of it at all—as akin to Earth’s rotation or the force of gravity: as just the way things are, rather than as a man-made construct that needs to be maintained and enforced.” Temporary shipping disruptions such as the Suez Canal blockage or a global…