Although my respect for India remains high—how all that order rises spontaneously out of chaos, so well explained in your earlier posts—with this latest post my elation for the country stemming from a recent visit, and my hopes for it going forward, have been tempered. The wind has been taken out of my sails given the lack of bedrock dedication to the rule of law and property rights. That the government has been captured by rent-seekers and corrupt players to the degree you outline suggests the full implementation of what some refer to as the American Idea, may be decades away.

What is the American Idea? Unlike most nations, America is less of a place on a map than it is a state of mind. The core of Americanism is summed up in the Declaration of Independence, which Thomas Jefferson once described as “an expression of the American mind.” That founding document stated many things, of which the recognition of the rights of individuals was sacrosanct. In doing so, America’s Founding Fathers consciously created a new polity—subordinating society and government to this fundamental law which heretofore had no foreign counterpart.