The 'free market' is the product of laws and rules continuously emanating from legislatures, executive departments, and courts.
As public schools deteriorate, the upper-middle class and wealthy send their kids to private ones. As public pools and playgrounds decay, the better-off buy memberships in private tennis and swimming clubs. As public hospitals decline, the well-off pay premium rates for private care.
A lot of attention has been going to social values - abortion, gay rights, other divisive issues - but economic values are equally important.
One tax dodge often used by multi-national companies is to squirrel their earnings abroad in foreign subsidiaries located in countries where taxes are lower.
The generosity of the super-rich is sometimes proffered as evidence they're contributing as much to the nation's well-being as they did decades ago when they paid a much larger share of their earnings in taxes.
If we want corporations to act differently, we have to force them to do so through laws that are fully enforced and through penalties higher than the economic benefits of thwarting the laws.
Economies are risky. Some industries rise, and others implode, like housing. Some places get richer, and others drop, like Atlantic City. Some people get new jobs that pay better, many lose their jobs or their wages.
Before the rise of the nation-state, between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries, the world was mostly tribal. Tribes were united by language, religion, blood, and belief. They feared other tribes and often warred against them.
A society - any society - is defined as a set of mutual benefits and duties embodied most visibly in public institutions: public schools, public libraries, public transportation, public hospitals, public parks, public museums, public recreation, public universities, and so on.
Media outlets that are exploiting Ebola because they want a sensational story and politicians using it to their own ends ought to be ashamed.
Rather than subsidize 'American' exporters, it makes more sense to subsidize any global company - to the extent it's adding to its exports from the United States.
Community colleges are great bargains. They avoid the fancy amenities four-year liberal arts colleges need in order to lure the children of the middle class.
Globalization and free trade do spur economic growth, and they lead to lower prices on many goods.
The liberal ideal is that everyone should have fair access and fair opportunity. This is not equality of result. It's equality of opportunity. There's a fundamental difference.
News and images move so easily across borders that attitudes and aspirations are no longer especially national. Cyber-weapons, no longer the exclusive province of national governments, can originate in a hacker's garage.
Even if there's no way to stop U.S. corporations from shedding their U.S. identities and becoming foreign corporations, there's no reason they should retain the privileges of U.S. citizenship.
Freedom is the one value conservatives place above all others, yet time and again, their ideal of freedom ignores the growing imbalance of power in our society that's eroding the freedoms of most people.
Instead of worrying about who's American and who's not, here's a better idea: Create incentives for any global company to do what we'd like it to do in the United States.
As digital equipment replaces the jobs of routine workers and lower-level professionals, technicians are needed to install, monitor, repair, test, and upgrade all the equipment.
Nations are becoming less relevant in a world where everyone and everything is interconnected. The connections that matter most are again becoming more personal.
