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The Conference Board forecasts that weaknesses emerging in some parts of the economy will intensify and grow more diffuse over the coming months, leading to a recession. This outlook is associated with numerous factors, including, persistent inflation, Federal Reserve hawkishness, dampened bank lending amid the banking crisis, reduced government spending due to the debt ceiling deal, and underlying trends in consumer spending and income, and business investment. We forecast that real GDP growth will slow to 1.0 percent in 2023, and then fall to 0.0 percent in 2024.

Consumer spending has fallen in four of the last six months. However, a large spike in January and a smaller spike in April offset this weakness. While spending on services has continued to gradually expand, spending on goods has been volatile. Recent PMI data suggest that the services sector is beginning to cool, and we expect high interest rates to further dampen spending on goods. We forecast that overall consumer spending will grow in Q2 2023 but anticipate a contraction in H2 2023.

The NFIB Small Business Optimism Index increased 0.4 points in May to 89.4, which is the 17th consecutive month below the 49-year average of 98. The last time the Index was at or above the average was in December 2021. Small business owners expecting better business conditions over the next six months declined one point from April to a net negative 50%. Twenty-five percent of owners reported that inflation was their single most important problem in operating their business, up two points from last month and followed by labor quality at 24%.

“Overall, small business owners are expressing concerns for future business conditions,” said Bill Dunkelberg, NFIB Chief Economist. “Supply chain disruptions and labor shortages will continue to limit the ability of many small firms to meet the demand for their products and services, while less severe than last year’s experience.”

What will have a greater impact on consumers' and voters' well-being - unemployment pain or inflation gain?

Some economists say the 'Misery Index', the unemployment rate plus the inflation rate, is a decent proxy for people's happiness and even presidential approval ratings.

NEW YORK, June 23 (Reuters) - Forecasts for second-quarter U.S. earnings still look gloomy after a much-better-than-feared first quarter season as the likelihood of further interest rate hikes this year creates more potential risks for companies.

Analysts expect earnings for S&P 500 companies to fall 5.6% in the second quarter from a year ago, according to IBES data from Refinitiv.

2023 global growth to slow to 1.7% from 3% expected six months ago

WASHINGTON, Jan. 10, 2023 — Global growth is slowing sharply in the face of elevated inflation, higher interest rates, reduced investment, and disruptions caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, according to the World Bank’s latest Global Economic Prospects report.

In the first quarter of 2023 US real GDP expanded at an annualised rate of 1.1%, according to the initial estimate from the Bureau of Economic Analysis—down significantly from 2.6% growth in the fourth quarter of 2022. However, the headline figure masks diverging trends; private consumption growth surged to 3.7% (annualised), up from just 1% in the final quarter of 2022, but this was largely offset by a steep decline in private inventory investment.

US economic data were mixed throughout the first quarter, suggesting that the US economy is at a turning point, coming out of a year of robust (but unsustainable) growth in 2022 and heading into a slowdown. These mixed signals complicate the task facing the Federal Reserve (Fed, the central bank) as it seeks to reduce still-high inflation without unnecessarily deepening the economic slowdown.

However, the sizable jump in the unemployment rate was also a surprise, rising to 3.7% from 3.4%. Economists polled by Refinitiv had expected it to edge up by only a percentage point.

The surge in the jobless rate — the largest monthly leap since the early days of the pandemic and, before that, November 2011 — was driven by people who lost their jobs permanently and those who completed a temporary job, BLS data shows. The labor force participation rate held steady in May at 62.6%, while the prime age participation rate, for workers between the ages of 25 and 54, rose to 83.4%, which is the highest since January 2007.

June 22 (Reuters) - The number of people filing for state unemployment benefits for the first time held steady at a 20-month high last week, remaining elevated for a third straight week in what may be an early indication of a softening labor market in the face of the Federal Reserve's aggressive credit tightening.

Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics on Thursday showed 264,000 new claims were filed for jobless benefits on a seasonally adjusted basis in the week ended June 17, unchanged from the prior week's upwardly revised level, which is the highest level of initial claims activity since October 2021.

Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell told lawmakers on Wednesday there is still "a long way to go" to  and interest rates are expected to rise further this year.

Why it matters: Powell began two days of appearances before Congress, where he is facing questions about the rate hiking campaign that the Fed paused as inflation , as well as the impact of higher rates on the economy and labor market.

Jerome H. Powell, the chair of the Federal Reserve, told House lawmakers that the United States remains a “long way” away from low and stable inflation even 15 months into the central bank’s campaign to cool the economy and wrestle down rapid price increases.

Mr. Powell is testifying before the House Financial Services Committee. He told lawmakers that the labor market remains very tight and that inflation — while it has come down notably from its peak last summer — is still too fast. In light of that, the Fed could raise interest rates even higher than their current level of just above 5 percent.

Mortgage rates ticked lower for the third week in a row as investors absorbed strong signals from the housing industry and last week’s pause on rate hikes by the Federal Reserve after 10 consecutive hikes.

The 30-year fixed-rate mortgage averaged 6.67% in the week ending June 22, down from 6.69% the week before, according to data from Freddie Mac released Thursday. A year ago, the 30-year fixed-rate was 5.81%.

While U.S. hegemony entails perplexities and burdens, an abandonment of hegemony may carry risks. Diminished U.S. leadership could prove dangerously disruptive of the international system and imperil the well-being of peoples everywhere, Americans included. A U.S. retreat could undermine an international economy that has generated impressive global abundance and peace beneficial to many. Simply consider the resources now available today (an annual worldwide output of $30 trillion at the end of the twentieth century) compared to fifty years earlier when it was a tenth that figure. Imagine what this amazing, unprecedented leap in global productivity has meant to health and welfare in all lands. Without U.S. leadership, so the defenders of hegemony claim, these gains might well have been limited, even nonexistent. A future of diminished abundance might prove distinctly unpleasant: greater discord among states and peoples leading to rising cultural intolerance, flaring nationalist fervor and rivalry, deepening international divisions, and fraying economic ties that would slow growth and press down longevity and health in wide swaths of the human population. This would be a world of narrower horizons, fewer choices, and less interaction among peoples and cultures. It would also be a world with diminished capacity for addressing mounting global problems. Advocates for maintaining U.S. dominance along current neoliberal lines hold the ideological high ground. The predominant version of American nationalism took a distinctly activist turn in the course of the twentieth century. From the 1890s to the 1920s the notion of the United States as a dynamic republic with the vision and energy to manage the world’s affairs began to come into its own. Republicans dedicated to an assertive policy along a broad front contributed to this shift in thinking. So too did Woodrow Wilson with his fervent support for the ideal of a progressive international society. In 1941 Henry Luce blended this set of nationalist ideas in his vision of an American century marked by the advance of political freedom, unhampered commerce, and general economic abundance. The most activist U.S. leaders after World War II drew from this creed, as appealing to visionary Wilsonians such as Harry Truman as to corporate-minded Republicans such as Ronald Reagan and the younger Bush. Over the past half century it has become an orthodoxy so potent in its appeal that challengers risk exile from membership in the foreign policy establishment and exclusion from government posts. Such is the allegiance commanded by the one true faith. Or as John Adams observed pungently, “Power always thinks it has a great Soul, and vast Views.”¹⁰ Even so, a good case can be made for a U.S. retreat from hegemony and toward a more modest and sustainable role in the world. A searching critique has no reason to linger on matters of style, particularly such easy targets as a policy governed by restless unilateralism or simplistic assumptions. Such a critique should instead turn to the hegemonic project itself. The place to begin a critical evaluation is with the tendency of the champions of hegemony to oversell the product. They point to its historical achievements to the neglect of the costs it has imposed on others. The leaders of the United States have managed hegemony with a lamentably heavy hand—with scant respect for human life and scant respect for human diversity. Millions died and many societies suffered profound disruption as a result of the U.S. interventions that dot the pages of this account. To those costs would have to be added an intolerance of views on markets and the state that diverge from U.S. preferences. As a result, U.S. pressure has in some cases blocked or disrupted socioeconomic and political experiments favored by others, especially in Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East. In other cases, an insistence on an American way has generated tensions with major states such as China or regions such as western Europe with divergent interests and values; that insistence has also strained ties with genuinely international organizations such as the UN. On virtually every front U.S. leaders have left themselves open to charges of hypocrisy—of ignoring if not violating the ideals of democracy and self-determination that they publicly profess. A look into the future reveals more grounds for doubts about the hegemonic project. Put simply, the time for U.S. hegemony may have passed. As the relative U.S. advantage in economic might and cultural appeal slips, attempts to exercise hegemony may prove increasingly counterproductive, doing more to further undermine than to confirm U.S. dominance. The U.S. economy labors under limits. Persistent structural problems include oil dependency, low domestic savings, and deep trade and federal budget deficits. The core U.S. cultural model—a faith in unending corporate-driven growth and the unending delights of consumerism—may be fading at least in the developed world. Western Europe and Japan have both drawn alongside the United States in their technological capacity, their income levels, their capital resources, and the depth and integration of their home markets. They need no longer look to the United States as a model in any of these areas. The consumer revolution led by Americans may have at least in these two regions run its course. Rising per capita income beyond a point (in the range of $15,000 in a fair sampling of countries recently surveyed) seems to produce no greater individual satisfaction while imposing costs captured not by conventional GDP data but by social GDP estimates.¹¹ In military affairs, the United States has retained, even increased, its dominance. But to what end? Its massive nuclear stockpile can be used only at the risk of profound and widespread moral revulsion and in some circumstances of devastating counterstrikes. Its high-tech forces may be the wonder of the world. But they are effective only against the most peripheral and isolated of states (in what one observer has dismissed as “theatrical micromilitarism”), and they have limited capacity to rebuild what they have destroyed.¹² The exercise of military might has proven a poor substitute for the intricacies of diplomatic negotiation, the trade-offs indispensable to international comity, and the long-term commitment of resources to economic development and human welfare. Finally, hegemony may hurt the hegemon. Evidence can be found in the privileging of corporate interests harmful to popular welfare, a fixation with military power that amounts to a national obsession, an increasingly infantilized and inert public, and the rise of an imperial presidency antithetical to genuine democracy. These trends validate a sharply critical view of foreign adventures that prevailed during the country’s first century. Proponents of republicanism claimed that crusades, even crusades conducted in the name of freedom, threatened freedom at home. The history of republican experiments across history showed that foreign entanglements and adventures created dangerous concentrations of political power within and undermined the very civic virtues on which the survival of any republic depended. Vindicating this republican fear is the rise of the imperial president and the concomitant atrophy of the democratic process. While most Americans today may not see hegemony through this anxious republican lens, many have voiced their discontent with the outward thrust of U.S. policy. Some express it in frustration and chagrin directed not against U.S. leaders but against a seemingly ungrateful, unyielding, dangerous world and call for scaling back international commitments. The most restive have contended that a more isolated, less burdened America would be better off— less vulnerable to attack, less dependent on fickle friends, less likely to get entangled in distant quarrels, and more secure in its homeland and its domestic liberties. Others refuse to go this far and instead put the blame squarely on U.S. leaders—political and corporate—whose free-market, environmental, and human rights policies have betrayed values as important at home as in the international community. Taken together, these critical reactions suggest a broad-based skepticism about hegemony. But the critics may be so fundamentally divided philosophically, politically, regionally, and socially that they cannot cobble together a common program to serve as an alternative to hegemony. A retreat from hegemony need not lead to isolationism. This myth about the nature of U.S. foreign relations in the past, which was constructed in the first place for the very purpose of justifying U.S. dominance, is likely to figure prominently in any defense of the status quo. But the notion of isolation is flawed as history and as a source of lessons. Today as earlier, the United States has a major stake in a productive, peaceful, and just global society. By extension, the United States has an obligation rooted in self-interest if not calculations of altruism and long-term human welfare to help mobilize a collective international response to the problems generated by that society. A retreat implies that the United States would act in world affairs not as the leader but as a leader, perhaps in some circumstances the first among equals. Engaging in a genuinely collaborative relationship with other states and taking international institutions and norms seriously may hold out the best hope of extending the considerable achievements of the previous fifty years and in the bargain maintaining U.S. influence and advancing U.S. well-being. The historical case for the efficacy of collaboration is compelling. The U.S. role after World War I calmed, for a time at least, the arms race, gave the Europeans a chance to sort out their monetary tangle, and sustained the turn-of-the-century drive to create humane standards of international conduct. The post–World War II record is even more striking. The achievements in setting norms (such as outlawing genocide), rehabilitating defeated Germany and Japan, and creating a framework for global prosperity were the result of collaboration richly repaid in international support and respect, not to mention enhanced U.S. security. This collaborative element helped not only to distinguish the U.S. from the Soviet side during the Cold War, but also to determine the outcome of a competition that was as much about systems and values as military might. International cooperation is not an illusion; it yields results far better than a course defined by narrow self-interest and pursued by brute force. Whatever the attractions of a more modest, collaborative internationalism, winning broad acceptance of such an approach faces serious difficulties. It requires that Americans think about their role in the world in a fresh, genuinely global way quite distinct from the cautious opportunism familiar from the first U.S. century and the rising assertiveness that has marked recent decades. It also requires a sensitivity to the intricacies of the global system and the cultural diversity of its parts. That sensitivity will not come easily to today’s body politic, which features a disengaged, ill-schooled public and a political class beholden to interest groups and trapped by shallow rhetoric and narrow, short-term calculations. Above all, the middle way offers nothing heroic to a country of individualists that may be dependent on civic nationalism as one of the few sources of collective identity. Indeed, calls for serious, long-term support for economic development programs, genuine respect for international norms, and tolerance for regional diversity collide with prevailing nationalist and neoliberal notions, which continue to inspire bold dreams of global transformation under the American aegis and in the American image. A retreat from hegemony would require a lot: a more cosmopolitan understanding of other cultures, a more sophisticated grasp of U.S. limits, a genuinely democratic electoral system responsive to popular preferences, and a better informed electorate able to think through those preferences. The fate of the current ascendancy with its hegemonic dimensions may well hang on how Americans measure up to these high standards and how rapidly structural problems eat away at the foundations of our hegemony. What the next page of the national story has to say may depend on how well we take into account the possibilities and constraints created by a history of burgeoning state power, strong nationalism, and intrusive global forces.

Well before 9/11 and the Iraq war put the idea in everybody's mind, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri had popularized the notion of a modern empire. Four years ago, they argued in a widely discussed book -- titled, as it happens, ''Empire'' -- that the globe was ruled by a new imperial order, different from earlier ones, which were based on overt military domination. This one had no center; it was managed by the world's wealthy nation-states (particularly the United States), by multinational corporations and by international institutions like the World Trade Organization and the International Monetary Fund. This empire -- a k a globalization -- was exploitative, undemocratic and repressive, not only for developing countries but also for the excluded in the rich West. Hardt and Negri's new book, ''Multitude,'' argues that the antidote to empire is the realization of true democracy, ''the rule of everyone by everyone, a democracy without qualifiers.'' They say that the left needs to leave behind outdated concepts like the proletariat and the working class, which vastly oversimplify the gender/racial/ethnic/ class diversities of today's world. In their place they propose the term ''multitude,'' to capture the ''commonality and singularity'' of those who stand in opposition to the wealthy and powerful. This book -- which lurches from analyses of intellectual property rules for genetically engineered animals to discourses on Dostoyevsky and the myth of the golem -- deals with an imaginary problem and a real problem. Unfortunately, it provides us with an imaginary solution to the real problem. The imaginary problem stems from the authors' basic understanding of economics and politics, which remains at its core unreconstructedly Marxist. For them, there is no such thing as voluntary economic exchange, only coercive political hierarchy: any unequal division of rewards is prima facie evidence of exploitation. Private property is a form of theft. Globalization has no redeeming benefits whatsoever. (East Asia's rise from third- to first-world status in the last 50 years seems not to have registered on their mental map.) Similarly, democracy is not embodied in constitutions, political parties or elections, which are simply manipulated to benefit elites. The half of the country that votes Republican is evidently not part of the book's multitude. To all this Hardt and Negri add an extremely confused theory, their take on what Daniel Bell labeled postindustrial society, and what has more recently been called the ''knowledge economy.'' The ''immaterial labor'' of knowledge workers differs from labor in the industrial era, Hardt and Negri say, because it produces not objects but social relations. It is inherently communal, which implies that no one can legitimately appropriate it for private gain. Programmers at Microsoft may be surprised to discover that because they collaborate with one another, their programs belong to everybody. It's hard to know even how to engage this set of assertions. Globalization is a complex phenomenon; it produces winners and losers among rich and poor alike. But you would never learn about the complexities from reading ''Multitude.'' So let's move on to Hardt and Negri's real problem, which has to do with global governance. We have at this point in human history evolved fairly good democratic political institutions, but only at the level of the nation-state. With globalization -- and increased flows of information, goods, money and people across borders -- countries are now better able to help, but also to harm, one another. In the 1990's, the harm was felt primarily through financial shocks and job losses, and since 9/11 it has acquired a military dimension as well. As the authors state, ''one result of the current form of globalization is that certain national leaders, both elected and unelected, gain greater powers over populations outside their own nation-states.'' The United States is uniquely implicated in this charge because of its enormous military, economic and cultural power. What drove people around the world crazy about the Bush administration's unilateral approach to the Iraq war was its assertion that it was accountable to no one but American voters for what it did in distant parts of the globe. And since institutions like the United Nations are woefully ill equipped to deal with democratic legitimacy, this democracy deficit is a real and abiding challenge at the international level. The authors are conscious of the charge that they, like the Seattle anti-globalization protesters they celebrate, don't have any real solutions to these matters, so they spend some time discussing how to fix the present international institutions. Their problem is that any fixes are politically difficult if not impossible to bring about, and promise only marginal benefits. Democratic institutions that work at the nation-state level don't work at global levels. A true global democracy, in which all of the earth's billions of people actually vote, is an impossible dream, while existing proposals to modify the United Nations Security Council or change the balance of power between it and the General Assembly are political nonstarters. Making the World Bank and I.M.F. more transparent are worthy projects, but hardly solutions to the underlying issue of democratic accountability. The United States, meanwhile, has stood in the way of new institutions like the International Criminal Court. It is at this point that Hardt and Negri take leave of reality -- arriving at an imaginary solution to their real problem. They argue that instead of ''repeating old rituals and tired solutions'' we need to begin ''a new investigation in order to formulate a new science of society and politics.'' The woolliness of the subsequent analysis is hard to overstate. According to them, the fundamental obstacle to true democracy is not just the monopoly of legitimate force held by nation-states, but the dominance implied in virtually all hierarchies, which give certain individuals authority over others. The authors dress up Marx's old utopia of the withering away of the state in the contemporary language of chaos theory and biological systems, suggesting that hierarchies should be replaced with networks that reflect the diversity and commonality of the ''multitude.'' The difficulty with this line of reasoning is that there is a whole class of issues networks can't resolve. This is why hierarchies, from nation-states to corporations to university departments, persist, and why so many left-wing movements claiming to speak on behalf of the people have ended up monopolizing power. Indeed, the powerlessness and poverty in today's world are due not to the excessive power of nation-states, but to their weakness. The solution is not to undermine sovereignty but to build stronger states in the developing world. To illustrate, take the very different growth trajectories of East Asia and sub-Saharan Africa over the past generation. Two of the fastest growing economies in the world today happen to be in the two most populous countries, China and India; sub-Saharan Africa, by contrast, has tragically seen declining per capita incomes over the same period. At least part of this difference is the result of globalization: China and India have integrated themselves into the global economy, while sub-Saharan Africa is the one part of the world barely touched by globalization or multinational corporations. But this raises the question of why India and China have been able to take advantage of globalization, while Africa has not. The answer has largely to do with the fact that the former have strong, well-developed state institutions providing basic stability and public goods. They had only to get out of the way of private markets to trigger growth. By contrast, modern states were virtually unknown in most of sub-Saharan Africa before European colonialism, and the weakness of states in the region has been the source of its woes ever since. Any project, then, to fix the ills of ''empire'' has to begin with the strengthening, not the dismantling, of institutions at the nation-state level. This will not solve the problems of global governance, but surely any real advance here will come only through slow, patient innovation and the reform of international institutions. Hardt and Negri should remember the old insight of the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, taken up later by the German Greens: progress is to be achieved not with utopian dreaming, but with a ''long march through institutions.''

The debate on empire is back. This is not surprising, as the United States dominates the world as no state ever has. It emerged from the Cold War the only superpower, and no geopolitical or ideological contenders are in sight. Europe is drawn inward, and Japan is stagnant. A half century after their occupation, the United States still provides security for Japan and Germany-the world's second- and third-largest economies. U.S. military bases and carrier battle groups ring the world. Russia is in a quasi-formal security partnership with the United States, and China has accommodated itself to U.S. dominance, at least for the moment. For the first time in the modern era, the world's most powerful state can operate on the global stage without the constraints of other great powers. We have entered the American unipolar age. The Bush administration's war on terrorism, invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, expanded military budget, and controversial 2002 National Security Strategy have thrust American power into the light of day-and, in doing so, deeply unsettled much of the world. Worry about the implications of American uni polarity is the not-so-hidden subtext of recent U.S.-European tension and has figured prominently in recent presidential elections in Germany, Brazil, and South Korea. The most fundamental questions about the nature of global politics-who commands and who benefits-are now the subject of conversation among long-time allies and adversaries alike. Power is often muted or disguised, but when it is exposed and perceived as domination, it inevitably invites response. One recalls the comment of Georges Clemenceau, who as a young politician said of the settlement ending the Franco Prussian War, "Germany believes that the logic of her victory means domination, while we do not believe that the logic of our defeat is serfdom." At Versailles a half-century later, he would impose just as harsh a peace on a defeated Germany. The current debate over empire is an attempt to make sense of the new uni polar reality. The assertion that the United States is bent on empire is, of course, not new. The British writer and labor politician Harold Laski evoked the looming Amer ican empire in 1947 when he said that "America bestrides the world like a colossus; neither Rome at the height of its power nor Great Britain in the period of economic supremacy enjoyed an influence so direct, so profound, or so pervasive...." And in deed, Dean Acheson and other architects of the postwar order were great admirers of the British Empire. Later, during the Vietnam War, left-wing thinkers and revisionist historians traced the same deep-rooted impulse toward militarism and empire through the history of U.S. foreign policy. The dean of this school, William Appleton Williams, argued in The Tragedy of American Diplomacy that the nation's genuine idealism had been subverted by the imperial pursuit of power and capitalist greed. Today, the "American empire" is a term of approval and optimism for some and disparagement and danger for others. Neoconservatives celebrate the imperial exercise of U.S. power, which, in a modern version of Rudyard Kipling's "white man's burden," is a liberal force that promotes democracy and undercuts tyranny, terrorism, military aggression, and weapons proliferation. Critics who identify an emerging American empire, meanwhile, worry about its unacceptable financial costs, its corrosive effect on democracy, and the threat it poses to the institutions and alliances that have secured U.S. national interests since World War II. THE "E" WORD No one disagrees that U.S. power is extraordinary. It is the character and logic of U.S. domination that is at issue in the debate over empire. The United States is not just a superpower pursuing its interest; it is a producer of world order. Over the decades-with more support than resistance from other nations-it has fashioned a distinctively open and rule-based international order. Its dynamic bundle of oversized capacities, interests, and ideals constitutes an "American project" with unprecedented global reach. For better or worse, other states must come to terms with or work around this protean order. Scholars often characterize international relations as the interaction of sovereign states in an anarchic world. In the classic Westphalian world order, states hold a monopoly on the use of force in their own territory while order at the international level is maintained through the diffusion of power among states. Today's unipolar world turns the Westphalian image on its head. The United States possesses a near-monopoly on the use of force internationally; on the domestic level, meanwhile, the institutions and behaviors of states are increasingly open to global-that is, American-scrutiny. Since September 11th, the Bush administration's assertion of "contingent sovereignty" and the right of preemption have made this transformation abundantly clear. The rise of unipolarity and the simultaneous unbundling of state sovereignty is a new and volatile brew. But is the resulting political formation an empire? And if so, will the American empire suffer the fate of great empires of the past: ravaging the world with its ambitions and excesses until overextension, miscalculation, and mounting opposition hasten its collapse? The term "empire" refers to the political control by a dominant country of the domestic and foreign policies of weaker countries. The European colonial empires of the late nineteenth century were the most direct, formal kind. The Soviet "sphere of influence" in Eastern Europe entailed an equally coercive but less direct form of control. The British Empire included both direct colonial rule and "informal empire." If empire is defined loosely, as a hierarchical system of political relationships in which the most powerful state exercises decisive influence, then the United States today indeed qualifies. If the United States is an empire, how ever, it is like no other before it. To be sure, it has a long tradition of pursuing crude imperial policies, most notably in Latin America and the Middle East. But for most countries, the U.S.-led order is a negotiated system wherein the United States has sought participation by other states on terms that are mutually agreeable. This is true in three respects. First, the United States has provided public goods particularly the extension of security and the support for an open trade regime in exchange for the cooperation of other states. Second, power in the U.S. system is exercised through rules and institutions; power politics still exist, but arbitrary and indiscriminate power is reigned in. Finally, weaker states in the U.S.-led order are given "voice opportunities"-informal access to the policymaking processes of the United States and the intergovernmental institutions that make up the international system. It is these features of the post-194S international order that have led historians such as Charles Maier to talk about a "consensual empire" and Geir Lundestad to talk about an "empire of invitation." The American order is hierarchical and ultimately sustained by economic and military power, but it is put at the service of an expanding system of democracy and capitalism.Fundamentally, then, the debate over the new American empire hinges on how extensive and deeply rooted these characteristics are-and whether its assertion of power since September 11 constitutes a fundamental break with this liberal past. THE GLOBAL RACKET In The Sorrows of Empire, Chalmers Johnson advances the disturbing claim that the United States' Cold War-era military power and far-flung base system have, in the last decade, been consolidated in a new form of global imperial rule. The United States, according to Johnson has become "a military juggernaut intent on world domination." Driven by a triumphalist ideology, an exaggerated sense of threats, and a self serving military-industrial complex, this juggernaut is tightening its grip on much of the world. The Pentagon has replaced the State Department as the primary shaper of foreign policy. Military commanders in regional headquarters are modern-day proconsuls, warrior-diplomats who direct the United States' imperial reach. Johnson fears that this military empire will corrode democracy, bankrupt the nation, spark opposition, and ultimately end in a Soviet-style collapse. In this rendering, the American military empire is a novel form of domination. Johnson describes it as an "international protection racket: mutual defense treaties, military advisory groups, and military forces stationed in foreign countries to 'defend' against often poorly defined, overblown, or nonexistent threats." These arrangements create "satellites"-Ostensibly independent countries whose foreign relations revolve around the imperial state. Johnson argues that this variety of empire was pioneered during the Cold War by the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe and the United States in East Asia. Great empires of the past-the Romans and the Han Dynasty Chinese-ruled their domains with permanent military encampments that garrisoned conquered territory. The American empire is innovative because it is not based on the acquisition of territory; it is an empire of bases. Johnson's previous polemic, Blowback, asserted that post-1945 U.S. spheres of influence in East Asia and Latin America were as coercive and exploitative as their Soviet counterparts. The Sorrows of Empire continues this dubious line. Echoing 1960s revisionism, Johnson asserts that the United States' Cold War security system of alliances and bases was built on manufactured threats and driven by expansionary impulses. The United States was not acting in its own defense; it was exploiting opportunities to build an empire. The Soviet Union and the United States, according to this argument, were more alike than different: both militarized their societies and foreign policies and expanded outward, establishing imperial rule through "hub and spoke" systems of client states and political dependencies. In Johnson's view, the end of the Cold War represented both an opportunity and a crisis for U.S. global rule-an opportunity because the Soviet sphere of influence was now open for imperial expansion, a crisis because the fall of the Soviet Union ended the justification for the global system of naval bases, airfields, army garrisons, espionage listening posts, and strategic enclaves. Only with the terrorist attacks of September 11th was this crisis resolved. Bush suddenly had an excuse to expand U.S. military domination. September 11 also allowed the United States to remove the fig leaf of alliance partnership. Washington could now disentangle itself from international commitments, treaties, and law and launch direct imperial rule. Unfortunately, Johnson offers no coherent theory of why the United States seeks empire. At one point, he suggests that the American military empire is founded on "a vast complex of interests, commitments, and projects." The empire of bases has become institutionalized in the military establishment and has taken on a life of its own. There is no discussion, however, of the forces within U.S. politics that resist or reject empire. As a result, Johnson finds imperialism everywhere and in everything the United States does, in its embrace of open markets and global economic integration as much as in its pursuit of narrow economic gains. Johnson also offers little beyond passing mention about the societies presumed to be under Washington's thumb. Domination and exploitation are, of course, not always self-evident. Military pacts and security partnerships are clearly part of the structure of U.S. global power, and they often rein force fragile and corrupt governments in order to project U.S. influence. But countries can also use security ties with the United States to their own advantage. Japan may be a subordinate security part ner, but the U.S.-Japan alliance also allows Tokyo to forgo a costly buildup of military capacity that would destabilize East Asia. Moreover, countries do have other options: they can, and often do, escape U.S. domination simply by asking the United States to leave. The Philippines did so, and South Korea may be next. The variety and complexity of U.S. security ties with other states makes Johnson's simplistic view of military hegemony misleading. In fact, the U.S. alliance system remarkably intact after half a century-has helped create a stable, open political space. Cooperative security is not just an instrument of U.S. domination; it is also a tool of political architecture. But Johnson neglects the broader complex of U.S.-supported multilateral rules and institutions that give depth and complexity to the international order. Ultimately, it is not clear what the United States could do-short of retreating into its borders or ceasing to exist-that would save it from Johnson's condemnation. PAX AMERICANA In Colossus, Niall Ferguson argues that the United States is indeed an empire and has been for a long time. To Ferguson, however, it is a liberal empire that upholds rules and institutions and underwrites public goods by maintaining peace, ensuring freedom of the seas and skies, and managing a system of international trade and finance. The United States is the imperfect but natural inheritor of the British system of global governance; it is open and integrative and inclined toward informal rule. Accordingly, Ferguson's worry is not that the world will get too much American empire but that it will not get enough. U.S. leaders, for all their benign intent, have unusually short attention spans and tend to go "wobbly." In Ferguson's view, the United States shares many characteristics with past empires. Like Rome, it has remarkably open citizenship. "Purple Hearts and U.S. citizenship were conferred simultaneously on a number of the soldiers serving in Iraq last year, just as service in the legions was once a route to becoming a civis romanus," Ferguson writes. "Indeed, with the classical architecture of its capital and the republican structure of its constitution, the United States is perhaps more like a 'new Rome' than any previous empire-albeit a Rome in which the Senate has thus far retained its grip on would-be emperors." The spread of America's language, ideas, and culture also invites comparison to Rome at its zenith. But Ferguson is even more taken by parallels with the British Empire. U.S. presidents, from Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and John F. Kennedy to Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush, have put their power work promoting the great liberal ideals of economic openness, democracy, limited government, human dignity, and the rule of law-a "strategy of openness" that is remarkably similar, Ferguson argues, to the aspirations of the British Empire in the second half of the nineteenth century. After all, it was a young Winston Churchill who argued that the aim of British imperialism was to "give peace to warring tribes, to administer justice where all was violence, to strike the chains off the slave, to draw the richness from the soil, to place the earliest seeds of commerce and learning, to increase in whole peoples their capacities for pleasure and diminish their chances of pain.... " Most of Colossus retells the familiar story of the rise of U.S. global dominance as an exercise in liberal empire. What is distinctive about American imperialism, according to Ferguson, is that it has been pursued in the name of anti-imperialism. For each phase of U.S. history, Ferguson nicely illuminates the tensions between republican ideals and the exercise of global power and shows how those tensions are often resolved. The Cold War-and George Kennan's doctrine of containment-provides the ultimate example of this fusion of anti-imperialism and hard power. Security, openness, democratic community, political commitment, and the mobilization of U.S. power went together. The core of U.S. global rule involved the enforcement of rules of economic openness, but the United States was also willing to act forcefully to integrate countries into the liberal order. Ferguson's most interesting claim is that the world needs more of this liberal American empire. This argument stems in part from the uncontroversial claim that the current international order needs enlightened leadership and that only Washington can provide it. (Ferguson holds little hope that Europe will ever overcome its preoccupation with the internal contradictions of its enlargement.) It is especially the wider system of sovereign but failed states that needs imperial supervision by Washington. In vast swatches of Africa, Asia, and the Middle East national self determination has led to much grief. Ferguson argues without qualification that "the experiment with political independence-especially in Africa-has been a disaster for most poor countries." To Ferguson, the extension of liberal empire into these regions (even involving some form of colonial rule) is necessary. What precisely these imperial arrangements would look like, however, remains unclear. When Ferguson says that he is "fundamentally in favor of empire," he is to some extent pulling a conceptual sleight of hand. What Ferguson means by "liberal empire" scholars have previously called "liberal hegemony": a hierarchical order that is still very different from traditional forms of empire. By virtue of its power, the liberal hegemon can act on its long-term interests rather than squabble over short-term gains with other states; it can identify its own national interests with the openness and stability of the larger system. The United States thus shapes and dominates the international order while guaranteeing a flow of benefits to other governments that earns their acquiescence. In contrast to empire, this negotiated order depends on agreement over the rules of the system between the leading state and everyone else. In this way, the norms and institutions that have developed around U.S. hegemony both limit the actual coercive exercise of U.S. power and draw other states into the management of the system. Ferguson's case for the virtues of American empire hinges on his claim that in the aftermath of the Soviet Union's collapse, the world could have gone one of two ways: international order organized around independent nations or an American imperium. He maintains that a world of decentralized, competing states, many of which are not democracies, would result in chaos. This may be true; he is certainly right that stability and open markets are not easily sustained without the support of powerful states. But the notion of liberal empire conflates very different types of U.S.-led order. One in which Washington coerces other states into obedience is very different from a system of multilateral rules and close partnerships. The challenges of peace and economic development that Ferguson identifies are best pursued by advanced democracies working together. Ultimately, such a cooperative order would require that Washington transcend the atavistic habits of empire rather than pursue a more complete realization of it. In the end, Ferguson finds invoking the image of empire useful for political reasons. Unlike the British, Americans do not believe that they operate an empire. As a result, the United States makes a flighty and impatient imperial power (in contrast to the British, who acquired a cultural mentality for global rule). Ferguson thinks that speaking honestly about the reality of American empire will foster understanding of its duties and obligations. Yet precisely the opposite is true. The United States does not need to view the world as its Raj and deploy a colonial service to the vast periphery; it needs to find ways to exercise its power in sustained, legitimate ways, working with others and developing more complex forms of cooperative international governance. It is also extremely doubtful that the American people would accept such a massive imperial undertaking: last September, as soon as President Bush revealed the price tag for occupying Iraq, public support plummeted immediately.

Libertarians think that taxation is theft. The government takes away part of your income and property by force. Your payments aren’t voluntary. If you think they are, try to withhold payment and see what happens. An influential book by Liam Murphy and Thomas Nagel, The Myth of Ownership, tries to show that this view of taxation is wrong. Many people, they say, foolishly resent taxes. By what right does the government take away part of what we own? Isn’t this legalized theft? The government may claim that it needs the funds to provide essential social services: are the poor to be left to starve? But these assertions do not justify its policy of forcible seizure. Isn’t it up to each owner of property to decide what, if anything, he wishes to donate to charity and other good causes? You might guess that the authors will respond, along conventional leftist lines, with a denial that property rights are absolute: you do not have the right to keep all that you own, if the government’s exactions are devoted to a good purpose. Quite the contrary, they adopt a much more radical stance. You are not giving away anything at all to the government when you pay taxes, since you own only what the laws say you do. Our authors are nothing if not direct on this point: "If there is a dominant theme that runs through our discussion, it is this: Private property is a legal convention, defined in part by the tax system; therefore, the tax system cannot be evaluated by looking at its impact on private property, conceived as something that has independent existence and validity. Taxes must be evaluated as part of the overall system of property rights that they help to create. . . . The conventional nature of property rights is both perfectly obvious and remarkably easy to forget . . . We cannot start by taking as given . . . some initial allocation of possessions— what people own, what is theirs, prior to government interference." An example quickly discloses the authors’ fallacy. Suppose that the government banned advocacy of libertarian property rights. Against those who claimed that this interfered with free speech, advocates of the new measure replied in this way: "Don’t you see the obvious conceptual error that underlies your protest? ‘Free speech’ is a legal category. People have no independent liberty of speech, apart from what a particular legal system grants them. Your opposition is absurd: away with you!" I doubt that Murphy and Nagel would display much patience for this sophistry. Legal rights indeed depend on the specifications of a particular legal system; but it is perfectly in order to say that people have moral rights, not created by the legal system, that the law ought to respect. In like fashion, opponents of taxation are guiltless of the conceptual error Murphy and Nagel impute to them. They maintain that people possess property rights that the government ought to recognize. Why is the falsity of this view "perfectly obvious"? It is rather Murphy and Nagel who have lapsed into grievous error: they confuse legal with moral rights. The authors at one place acknowledge the point at issue: "[D]eontological theories hold that property rights are in part determined by our individual sovereignty over ourselves. . . . On a deontological approach, there is likely to be a presumption of some form of natural entitlement that determines what is yours or mine and what isn’t, and this prima facie presumption has to be overridden by other considerations if appropriation by taxes is to be justified. On a consequentialist approach, by contrast, the tax system is simply part of the design of any sophisticated modern system of property rights." Our authors of course reject the entitlement view, but they have here made a crucial admission. Given that this theory exists, is it not evident that their earlier account is false? The alleged error that opponents of taxation commit is present only if the conventionalist theory is true. Supporters of Lockean entitlements to property may be incorrect, but they at least have a theory: they stand acquitted of simply failing to grasp a conceptual point, the charge that Murphy and Nagel bring against them. Do they think the Lockean account obviously incoherent? They say nothing against it but instead go on interminably to accuse opponents of their view of confusion. The conventionalist theory they support leads quickly to disaster. Isn’t it "perfectly obvious" that it makes us all slaves of the government? Once more, Murphy and Nagel acknowledge the objection. Their view "is likely to arouse strong resistance" because it "sounds too much like the claim that the entire social product really belongs to the government, and that all after-tax income should be seen as a kind of dole that each of us receives from the government, if it chooses to look on us with favor" They fail to see that their admission gives away the game. If, as they admit, individual rights require some degree of private property, then the government cannot morally tax away this property. If so, there are moral limits to the taxing power, and it is not "a matter of logic" that there cannot be a pre-tax income over which persons retain full control Murphy and Nagel are pure conventionalists about property when this enables them to attack libertarians, but they shrink from the full implications of the position. How is this tension in their presentation to be resolved? I suspect that in practice they would not deviate very far from the total subordination of property rights to the state. They consider endowment taxation, in which people are taxed, not just on their income, but rather on their potential to generate revenue. Someone who abandoned a multi-million-dollar business career in order to become a Trappist monk might on the endowment account be taxed as if he continued to receive his former high income. Our authors eventually reject this monstrous proposal, though not on the grounds that it compels people to work. To reject the proposal because it compelled people to work would put them suspiciously close to a famous argument, advanced very effectively by Robert Nozick, that income taxes are akin to forced labor. Of course our authors cannot accept so libertarian a view; "we may assume that this argument is not dispositive against taxation of earnings." Since taxation is acceptable—this we know a priori—no argument that holds it illegitimate is right. But then we cannot reject endowment taxation if we reason in a way that would also condemn the income tax. "[T]here is no intrinsic moral objection to taxing people who don’t earn wages" (p. 124). We can, then, maintain that endowment taxation is "too radical" an interference with autonomy; but we cannot in principle reject it. If you affirm a “conventionalist” account of property, you will wind up in dark waters. Taxation is indeed theft.

Humanity’s capacity for tyranny, and its tendency to emerge —bringing with it a devouring and insatiable appetite for suffering — appears universal throughout human societies and across time. Yet the more I try to isolate its origins and understand its psychological contours, the more I’ve come to see this demonic element of our species as inextricably entwined with elements of humanity — typically portrayed positively — like love, compassion, and safety. Tyranny isn’t devoid of such ideals; it’s a strategy for pursuing them in the face of uncertainty. In fact it may represent humanity’s oldest strategy for doing so. Yet it’s an incomplete strategy, and one accompanied by a host of undesirable — often murderous — side-effects. So how do we avoid it? It’s my belief that by understanding and controlling the emergence of tyranny within ourselves, we build a world absent the fertile soil in which tyranny’s “evil spirits” plant their strangling vines at larger scales. To that end, I’d like to address the following questions: What forces precipitate the psychological roots of tyranny? Why does tyrannical behavior emerge at increasing scales of human behavior? How can one combat these self — and world — destroying tendencies? To understand and act upon the following is to take responsibility for one’s own life and to spare the lives of those one might otherwise tyrannize; it’s to fully own one’s personal responsibility for tyranny’s emergence, and to play one’s part in freeing our world from its clutches. The Psychological Roots of Tyranny For our purposes, let’s define tyranny as: “The cruel, unreasonable, or arbitrary use of power or control.” From where does this tendency emerge? It’s easy to imagine those who exercise such methods of power or control as a breed apart from the rest; unlike us, they are heartless monsters out to impose their tyrannical will upon the innocent. But of course that’s a caricature. It’s a caricature we create — as a shield — to protect ourselves from the nagging suspicion that the tendency toward tyranny lurks deep within our own soul. But unfortunately for all, lurk it does. Given the often disastrous repercussions of exercising such a tendency, why would it exist within us all? The theory I find most compelling, explored at length in Dr. Jordan Peterson’s seminal work Maps of Meaning, posits that the capacity for tyranny resides within us as a strategy for preventing the intrusion of uncertainty into our otherwise stable psychological environment. In other words, tyranny is a psychological shield we use to protect ourselves from unwanted exposure to negative emotional states, a tool for preempting painful change and justifying the use of outdated models of the world. Or as Peterson puts it:

human tyranny is evil

Freedom is one of America’s most cherished values. The cognitive scientist George Lakoff considers it the nation’s “most important idea… at the center of all other important ideas.” Likewise, in his studies of American values in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the social psychologist Milton Rokeach found that freedom was by far America’s most important political value, ranked behind only world peace and familial security in the nation’s hierarchy of values. Behind this commonplace agreement on the centrality of freedom in American life, however, lurk three fundamental questions.

Occam’s razor, also spelled Ockham’s razor, also called law of economy or law of parsimony, principle stated by the Scholastic philosopher William of Ockham (1285–1347/49) that pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate, “plurality should not be posited without necessity.” The principle gives precedence to simplicity: of two competing theories, the simpler explanation of an entity is to be preferred. The principle is also expressed as “Entities are not to be multiplied beyond necessity.”

The Advantages of Deontological Theories Having canvassed the two main types of deontological theories (together with a contractualist variation of each), it is time to assess deontological morality more generally. On the one hand, deontological morality, in contrast to consequentialism, leaves space for agents to give special concern to their families, friends, and projects. At least that is so if the deontological morality contains no strong duty of general beneficence, or, if it does, it places a cap on that duty’s demands. Deontological morality, therefore, avoids the overly demanding and alienating aspects of consequentialism and accords more with conventional notions of our moral duties. Likewise, deontological moralities, unlike most views of consequentialism, leave space for the supererogatory. A deontologist can do more that is morally praiseworthy than morality demands. A consequentialist cannot, assuming none of the consequentialists’ defensive maneuvers earlier referenced work. For such a pure or simple consequentialist, if one’s act is not morally demanded, it is morally wrong and forbidden. Whereas for the deontologist, there are acts that are neither morally wrong nor demanded, some—but only some—of which are morally praiseworthy. As we have seen, deontological theories all possess the strong advantage of being able to account for strong, widely shared moral intuitions about our duties better than can consequentialism. The contrasting reactions to Trolley, Fat Man, Transplant, and other examples earlier given, are illustrative of this. Finally, deontological theories, unlike consequentialist ones, have the potential for explaining why certain people have moral standing to complain about and hold to account those who breach moral duties. For the moral duties typically thought to be deontological in character—unlike, say, duties regarding the environment—are duties to particular people, not duties to bring about states of affairs that no particular person has an individual right to have realized.

Having now briefly taken a look at deontologists’ foil, consequentialist theories of right action, we turn now to examine deontological theories. In contrast to consequentialist theories, deontological theories judge the morality of choices by criteria different from the states of affairs those choices bring about. The most familiar forms of deontology, and also the forms presenting the greatest contrast to consequentialism, hold that some choices cannot be justified by their effects—that no matter how morally good their consequences, some choices are morally forbidden. On such familiar deontological accounts of morality, agents cannot make certain wrongful choices even if by doing so the number of those exact kinds of wrongful choices will be minimized (because other agents will be prevented from engaging in similar wrongful choices). For such deontologists, what makes a choice right is its conformity with a moral norm. Such norms are to be simply obeyed by each moral agent; such norm-keepings are not to be maximized by each agent. In this sense, for such deontologists, the Right is said to have priority over the Good. If an act is not in accord with the Right, it may not be undertaken, no matter the Good that it might produce (including even a Good consisting of acts in accordance with the Right).