That very year, Tyler Cowen was commissioned to lay the conceptual groundwork for the planned push to transform America with a paper titled “Why Does Freedom Wax and Wane?”59 The paper was a review of research that could guide the Mercatus Center in its quest to eradicate the “restrictions on liberty” characteristic of twentieth-century democracies.60 What did Cowen discover? One key finding was that by the 1920s, in both Europe and the United States, “the expansion of the voter franchise” beyond “wealthy male landowners” had produced the unfortunate result of enlarged public sectors. Alas,
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