July 11, 2025 - International Man: As the U.S. approaches its 250th anniversary, how would you compare the personal and economic freedoms Americans have today with those envisioned by the Founding Fathers in 1776?
Doug Casey: The U.S. has had a good, long run as a beacon of freedom for the entire world, but nothing lasts forever. Things started changing radically with the War Between the States, and the ascendancy of progressives like Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. Then came FDR with his New Deal, and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society; and it has accelerated downhill from there.
The trend in the U.S. is critically important. However, Western civilization is in decline throughout the world. It is more than just a civilizational issue. There is a rot in ethics, philosophy, and even the makeup of the population. People of European descent are declining all over the world, especially in Europe itself, where the native population is dropping rapidly. Even in the United States, figures show that the white population dropped by 250,000 in the last year, while the populations of all other ethnic groups rose substantially.
Apart from the huge and obvious changes in technology, I think the US founders would find the country culturally unrecognizable. This trend is underscored by the presumptive election of Zohran Mamdani as mayor of New York. He is young, affable, charismatic. His appeal is understandable relative to the corrupt and constipated alternatives. But he is also a Muslim Communist who openly wants to overthrow what is left of American traditions in the largest and most important city in the country.
International Man: What do you see as the most dangerous erosions of civil liberties in the US today - and how did we get here?
Doug Casey: All things become corrupt and wind down over time. The Second Law of Thermodynamics affects political systems just as it does the physical world. Everything degrades and dissolves. Unfortunately, that includes the U.S. Constitution. It has been interpreted, amended, and disregarded into a dead letter.
That is particularly true of the Bill of Rights, which is the most important part of the Constitution. The most important part of the Bill of Rights is freedom of speech. All the other freedoms rest upon it, because if you have a thought and you can’t express it, you are as good as a slave. You can work and pay taxes, but if you say the wrong thing, you will be punished. Best to restrict what you think and say to the weather, sports, and the condition of the roads; and be careful what you say about the weather.
For what it is worth, the situation is much worse in the UK, Germany and Canada, among others. Simply making members of protected groups uncomfortable is cause for prosecution and jailing. Hundreds of people have been fined and/or jailed in those countries just for saying - or being perceived to have said - something considered politically incorrect by the powers that be.
International Man: Many Americans still believe they live in the Land of the Free. In your view, is this a myth? What freedoms do they think they have that, in reality, they no longer do?
Doug Casey: Myth rules people’s beliefs and actions vastly more than does reality itself. For instance, soldiers are taught to think and say that they are fighting for freedom. That is accepted as a tautology. But in fact, U.S. soldiers rarely fight for freedom. They fight for the government, which has sent them to some shithole, where they don’t speak the language or understand the culture; and where, typically, most of the locals view them as invaders.
People believe they have freedoms. But those freedoms mainly exist as holograms. They are insubstantial phantoms. Our vaunted freedoms are so eroded they exist mostly as myth - but, as I said earlier, myth is much more powerful than reality.
Americans think they have free thought, but that has been overruled by political correctness and thought crimes. Free speech has been overruled by cancel culture. Free markets have been pretty much regulated out of existence. We think we have limited government, but the State is absolutely everywhere and in everything.
Individualism is deemed antisocial and is overruled by identity politics. Rationality, logic and science are deemed “white” or impositions of “the patriarchy.” Liberty is seen as a danger that needs to be excluded from safe spaces. The very concept of progress may lead to inequality, which makes progress a dangerous thing.
The list can go on, but freedoms that were self-evident facts 250 years ago have been completely watered down. The average American is basically Socialist and Left-leaning. Sad to say, “the land of the free” is a myth.
International Man: How is the U.S. education system failing to instill the principles of liberty and critical thinking that underpinned the American Revolution?
Doug Casey: Not only is it failing to instill these things, but it is doing exactly the opposite. It is indoctrinating students with Socialist principles. That is no surprise. It is to be expected because the public school system is run by government employees who naturally think like bureaucrats. They are all members of teachers’ unions, which are among the most Left-wing of labor organizations.
It is a far cry from the one-room schoolhouse of the past, where children - rather than being imprisoned and listening to mostly irrelevant lectures from a bureaucrat - were, in effect, taught by a mentor. The older students would help the younger ones, breeding responsibility. Schools today exist, at great expense, for two reasons: 1) to indoctrinate the students, 2) to keep them off the street while their parents are at work.
The school system in the U.S. is dysfunctional and should be replaced with something else.
International Man: What roles do central banking, taxation and economic regulation play in the decline of freedom and liberty in the U.S.?
Doug Casey: The three things you mentioned make economic prosperity much harder to achieve. Central banking causes inflation, which, along with taxation, makes it very hard for the average guy to build capital. It is extremely hard for someone who produces more than he consumes to save the difference, because those savings are being inflated out of existence. Worse, he can only save what is left after lots of direct and indirect taxation. If you do manage to put together some savings, economic regulation makes building a business extremely expensive and risky.
The net result of government is that the average guy is impoverished and in debt. It is hard to experience freedom when you are actually an indentured servant. Yet people think the State is their friend, and they can vote their way to liberty and prosperity.
