No truly free places left in our world. The kind of freedom that was being invoked here was the freedom from government, which meant freedom from taxation and regulation, which in turn meant the freedom to act purely in one’s own interest, without having to consider the interests of others—which seemed to me the most bloodless and decrepit conception of freedom imaginable. (It was surely no coincidence, I thought, that little was ever said about building “communities” on Mars: the concept of community involved thinking of other people as more than burdens, or resources to be exploited, or
...more
