Back in the early 1990s it was assumed by some of the deep in thought that the dissolution of the Soviet Union signaled the “end of history” of sorts. Supposedly small l liberal democracy of the western kind was an endpoint in the historical evolution of government. It never made sense.
And it didn’t precisely because human nature wasn’t going to disappear with the happy vanishing of the U.S.S.R. and other Iron Curtain countries. Ambitious people make things happen, though not always for the good. Some channel their ambition through the force that is government, which means we’ll likely never reach the final frontier in a governance sense. For good and bad.
That governance continues to evolve is maybe a good way to quiet the nervous minds of a policy elite increasingly of the view that “Big Tech” must be reined in. Lefties at the New York Times like Kara Swisher want government to restrict the power of Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Google et al, but so do Hoover Institution conservatives like Victor Davis Hanson. Both miss the boat, as do countless others who are convinced that the previously mentioned technology companies possess market power without endpoint.
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