>This article includes some essential details that are largely unknown to most readers: the US government not only severely restricted the ability of foreigners to even enter the United States based on ideology and national origin
Is there a country in the world that doesn't do this? I understand that some people want some sort of borderless society, but support for this is basically a fringe belief in every country.
>they also severely restricted the ability of Americans to LEAVE THEIR OWN COUNTRY, again based upon ideology and "race" (see the case of the Black American journalist whose passport was revoked because he dared to report from Cuba!)
It's worth noting that the courts have ruled that such restrictions were unlawful. Given that, it seems like the system was working as expected?
>The greatest triumph of the American system of doctrinal management has been the inculcation of the bedrock belief that "we live in a free society." We do not, and we never have.
The problem with this argument is that it hinges on the definition of "free society", and therefore any discussion over it is inevitably going to end up arguing over what "free society" means. It's trivial to make the same statement about other country that's allegedly a "free society". eg.
"Sweden is a free society."
"Actually no, how can you even claim that? They have hate speech laws which severely limit your ability to make unorthodox views on race/gender. Only the US (which has no hate speech laws) is a free society!"
>Would a "free" country jail its citizens at a rate FIVE TIMES HIGHER than the other countries of the world?
Perhaps, depending on how strongly it feels about crime. For instance, Taiwan has incarceration rate that's roughly twice of China. Does that mean it's not a free country? Or is a 2x factor small enough to let slide?
>Would a "free" country maintain police forces in every major city that are larger and more well-equipped than most national armies worldwide?
That sounds surprising until you realize that:
1. many metrics relating to size follow a pareto distribution, so not surprising at all that "major cities" in the US exceed the median country in some metric. For instance, if we look at GDP, we see that the median "country/territory"[1] has a gdp of 26.461 billion. If we compare that to data from the BEA[2], we see that there's a whopping 113 metropolitan statistical areas that exceed the median "country/territory" GDP.
2. "national armies" tend to be smaller than "police officers" in most countries, which make the criteria even easier to fulfill.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...
[2] https://www.bea.gov/data/gdp/gdp-county-metro-and-other-area...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependen...
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of...