Uprooted: The Ralph Kand Story

This is a story about a man with a singular quest: Freedom. It's one of the primary reasons people leave their homelands, often at great personal sacrifice.

In 1940, without firing a shot, the Soviet Union absorbed the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, situated on the southern coast of the Gulf of Finland. Along with territorial acquisition, this move was a major coup in projecting Soviet naval presence westward. Besides taking in the tiny navies and merchant marine fleets of the three states, the Soviet Red Banner Baltic Fleet acquired a number of important naval bases on the Baltic Sea. Chief among them was Tallinn, capital of Estonia and a major port city.  --Victor J Kamenir, Warfare History Network, 2008

INTRODUCTION

I met Ralph in the early 1990s on the beach at Park Point in Duluth, Minnesota. I was lying on a blanket reading while my children played in the sand near the water. At some point I glanced behind me and noticed an elderly man making his way across the beach.

He walked with considerable difficulty. One leg was badly withered; the other was strong and muscular from years of compensating for it. He was somewhat stooped and wore shorts and a button-down shirt. When he reached the water, he removed his shirt and slowly made his way into Lake Superior.

He stayed in the cold water for nearly twenty minutes. When he came out, he gathered his belongings and began the slow walk back toward his car. As he passed me, he stopped.

“You like to read,” he said. He had a strong Eastern European accent.

I told him I did, and we began talking. He told me he had loved libraries while growing up. When I mentioned that I was a writer, Ralph said people had told him many times that someone should write the story of his life.

He had grown up in Estonia, outside Tallinn on the Baltic Sea, and was now in his seventies. Before leaving, he offered me a glimpse of the story he wanted to tell.

“Would you like to hear how learning new languages saved my life?” he asked. “Come to my apartment and I will tell you more.” 

Chapter 1

Ralph Kand was born on August 7, 1919, during Estonia's War of Independence. He grew up with his parents and brother on the outskirts of Tallinn, the capital of Estonia. When Ralph was three, he fell from a fence post and broke his hip. The injury left his left leg permanently damaged. It remained thin and crooked, and Ralph walked with a limp for the rest of his life. He would never run again.

The disability did not keep him from doing the things he wanted to do. When he learned to type, he practiced until he became the second-fastest typist in Estonia.

As a teenager, Ralph wanted to ski. Nearly everyone in Estonia skied, but his damaged leg made it difficult. He devised a way to strap his left leg and foot securely to a ski and taught himself. Eventually he became a fast skier.

Ralph also read a great deal. He spent many hours in the library and particularly liked Thomas Mann. The Magic Mountain made a lasting impression on him. Ralph remembered Hans Castorp looking at the night sky and wondering about the size and meaning of the universe. More than sixty years later, Ralph was still talking about the book.

Within a week of meeting Ralph on the beach, I went to his apartment in Duluth to hear the story he had mentioned. That visit began a friendship that lasted for years.

Ralph had moved to Duluth because his wife needed nursing-home care. He wanted to live near Lake Superior because the lake reminded him of the Baltic Sea and Estonia.

Here is the first story he told me.

In 1939 the Red Army occupied Estonia after Estonia had been forced to sign the Bases Treaty. Ralph was 20 years old and working at a brewery in Tallinn called The Rooster. The brewery had been built by the French years earlier and stood on a hillside overlooking the sea. Ralph worked in the office, typing the paperwork for incoming orders.

After the Soviets arrived, authorities ordered windows facing the harbor to be whitewashed. Ralph assumed they didn't want Estonians watching Soviet naval activity. The brewery windows were painted as well. The next day Ralph scratched a small hole in the whitewash with his thumbnail so he could see the Russian ships in the harbor. He wasn't the only one. People all over Tallinn did the same thing.

Living under Soviet rule meant living with the possibility of arrest. Ralph's friends told him he probably had little to worry about because of his crippled leg. They were wrong.

One day two vehicles pulled up behind the brewery. Men wearing greatcoats entered through the rear door. They were members of the NKVD, the Soviet secret police. One of the men carried a list containing six names. The NKVD officers asked where each man worked. One by one, the men were located and brought into a small dining area. Ralph was among the first because his workstation was nearby.

As another man was being escorted down the hallway, he saw the others being held and tried to run. He was shot in the hallway. Ralph stayed where he was.

Meanwhile, two NKVD officers went to the far end of the brewery to find the last man on their list. While they were gone, a Russian soldier entered to pick up an order. No one was at the counter, so he began shouting for someone to help him. Finally, one of the NKVD men told Ralph to go take care of the order.

The soldier was there to pick up a load of vodka. Ralph went outside with him to help carry the cases to his truck. Once they were outside, Ralph spoke to the soldier in Russian. He explained that the man inside wearing the greatcoat was NKVD and that Ralph was under arrest. Then Ralph proposed a plan. As they loaded the truck, they would stack the cases in a way that left a space where Ralph could hide. When they brought out the last case, Ralph would climb into the truck behind the vodka. The soldier was to drive through the gate without stopping.

The Russian soldier agreed. When the last case was loaded, Ralph climbed into the hiding place. The soldier got behind the wheel and drove for the gate.

The NKVD officer realized what was happening and ran outside. He fired several shots after the truck, but it was already too far away and Ralph escaped.

More than fifty years later, sitting in his apartment in Duluth, he told me why that story mattered. “If I hadn't learned Russian, I wouldn't be here today.”

CONTINUED

Uprooted is a true story about a man with a singular quest: Freedom. The longing for freedom is one of the primary reasons people leave their homelands, often at great personal sacrifice.

Happy 250th USA

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

— Thomas Jefferson, Declaration of Independence (1776)

On this Independence Day, that bold promise still echoes as the beating heart of what makes America exceptional: a nation founded on timeless ideals: freedom, self-government, and the dignity of every individual. 

God bless the United States of America. 

A Note from Ayaan Hirsi Ali

"I became an American not by birth or by right, but by choice. Like many immigrants, I came to this country from a world in which I’d had no right to speak freely; no right to choose whom I would marry, or where or how I would live; no hope for the kind of life and career with which I am blessed today. I came from a culture in which my station was assigned at birth, by virtue of my sex, and could never be appealed. Looking back today, I can hardly find words to express how grateful I am, every day, to call this country my own."

Largest American flag in the world with mural of whales.

Mural and flag by Wyland, the Marine Michelangelo

All photos courtesy Gary Firstenberg, America's Photographer

Related Link

Spotlight on Wyland, the Marine Michaelangelo

A Free Press Is Fundamental to a Free Nation

"Men love darkness rather than light because their deeds are evil."--John 3:19

One of the most. significant features of the U.S. Constitution is the first 10 amendments to the United States Constitution known as the Bill of Rights. It could be argued that this is one of the more profound documents in history, guaranteeing fundamental individual freedoms while limiting government power.

Throughout our history we have witnessed assaults on these various tenets that were brilliantly and thoughtfully conceived by our Founding Fathers. To our benefit these attacks have been rebuffed. 

Today I'm thinking about one of the most important freedoms: freedom of the press, a freedom that is not universally shared. 

On Sunday March 8, the NYTimes editorial board published a feature editorial titled The Free Press Is Under Threat Globally.

The editorial argues that press freedom is deteriorating around the world and warns that democracy itself is at risk if independent journalism continues to weaken as governments increasingly use arrests, lawsuits, and intimidation to silence journalists. 

Record numbers of reporters are imprisoned today, particularly in authoritarian countries, creating a chilling effect on investigative work. At the same time, digital surveillance and unresolved violence have made journalism more dangerous. The piece concludes that a free press is essential to democracy, and that the United States must defend it both at home and abroad to maintain credibility. When journalists are silenced, corruption and abuse of power flourish. Protecting independent journalism, the board argues, should be a priority for governments and citizens everywhere.

Here's an excerpt: 

At least 330 journalists worldwide were in prison at the end of 2025, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, up from fewer than 200 a decade ago. More than a third of them were serving sentences of five years or more. Nearly half remained behind bars despite never having been formally sentenced. One-fifth say they were tortured or beaten. An additional 129 members of the press died while doing their jobs or because of them, the highest number since records began in 1992. Among the worst offenders against press freedom have been China, Russia, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Israel, Myanmar, Sudan and Turkey.

A little further the Editorial Board stated:

The press faces challenges in freer societies, too. Israel's war in Gaza led to the arrest of almost 100 Palestinian journalists, often without charge, and at least twice that number were killed over two years, a toll without modern precedent. 

This latter statement is especially disconcerting. In addition to the elimination of hospitals and medical care, the targeting of journalists is undoubtedly one of the most troubling facets of the Gaza conflict. As I read the op-ed it brought to mind a Medium post I wrote in 2020, "The Real Reason They Punish Horse Thieves." 

As George Savile, Marquis of Halifax, noted, “Men are not hanged for stealing horses, but that horses may not be stolen.” Can this be the real reason they shoot journalists in Gaza or eliminate them elsewhere? 

The Watergate affair and My Lai massacre made heroes of journalists like Woodword and Bernstein and Sy Hersh. Their work inspired others to pursue this important profession.

Not all government leaders, however, want their deeds exposed. Fraud? Thievery? Corruption? War crimes? No wonder they shoot the messengers. 

The Old Testament prophet Jeremiah stated that the heart is deceitful above above all things. Even good kings can go bad. Thus the Times board concludes that a free press is essential to democratic accountability. 

* * * * *

Read: The Real Reason They Punish Horse Thieves

Related: 

Judge Rules Pentagon Restrictions on Press Are Unconstitutional

Kenny Holston/The New York Times March 20, 2026

Comments welcome below.

Finding Balance with Regards to Crime

Last week, while reading a chapter from economist and social thinker Thomas Sowell's Knowledge and Decisions, this statement jumped off the page: “While the concept of an ‘optimal’ quantity of crime may be uncomfortable, it is also clear that no one is prepared to devote half the Gross National Product to stamping out every residual trace of gambling.”

It is a bracing statement. Steven Spielberg's Minority Report immediately came to mind. In the film crime is nearly eliminated through pre-crime technology that arrests individuals before they act. The result is remarkable safety—but at the cost of due process and moral agency. The film underscores this same tension Sowell sites: in trying to eradicate crime completely, a society may sacrifice the very freedom it seeks to protect.

No one likes the idea that some level of crime may be inevitable. We instinctively want safety to be absolute. Yet Sowell’s point, and Spielberg's, is not that crime is acceptable, but that trade-offs are unavoidable.

Every society must balance liberty, cost, and security. Eliminating every infraction would require a surveillance state, vast expenditures, and a level of intrusion most citizens would reject. Cameras on every corner, or as in Orwell's 1984, every home. Police in every transaction. Bureaucracy in every exchange. The cure would likely become more oppressive than the disease.

The American experiment has always wrestled with this tension. We prize freedom—freedom of movement, enterprise, speech, and association. But freedom carries risk. A society that leaves room for initiative also leaves room for misconduct. The question is not whether crime can be reduced; it can and should be. The question is how far we are willing to go, and at what cost to other goods and values we cherish.

There's also a moral dimension. A mature society must distinguish between different kinds of wrongdoing. Violent crime threatens life and order and demands serious response. Other offenses—regulatory violations, minor vice crimes, youthful mistakes—raise different considerations. Treating all infractions as equally intolerable can produce overcriminalization, overcrowded prisons, and strained public budgets without meaningfully improving safety.

Finding balance requires clarity about priorities. Government’s primary duty is protection, but protection must be proportionate. Resources are finite. Tax dollars spent on marginal enforcement are dollars not spent on schools, infrastructure, or public health. Excessive time spent policing low-level infractions may be time not spent addressing serious threats.

Another out of balance feature is that because of efforts to hold police under the spotlight lest they misbehave, they now spend four hours out of a twelve-hour shift filling out paperwork. This distrust of police ties up more of an officer's time so that they have less time for responding to real crime. (EdNote: These numbers from our Duluth police department may vary from other police districts.)

George Orwell warned, “In a society in which there is no law, and no police, and no one willing to enforce order, there is no freedom.” Freedom is not the absence of authority; it is the presence of reliable order. Businesses large and small depend on contracts being enforced, property being protected, and disputes being settled peacefully. When theft, vandalism, and intimidation go unchecked, commerce shrinks and ordinary people retreat. When businesses close it also reduces the number of jobs available. And as statistics show, fewer jobs has a direct correlation to higher crime.

Movements to “defund the police,” whatever their intentions, risk weakening the very conditions that allow neighborhoods and businesses to flourish. Police accountability matters, but dismantling enforcement erodes trust and investment. Law and order are not enemies of liberty—they are its scaffolding.

In the end, the search for balance reflects a deeper truth: human beings are imperfect, and any free society must manage that imperfection without surrendering the very freedoms it seeks to defend. No question that finding balance is an ongoing challenge, but wisdom isn't found in extremes. Finding the "Golden Mean" is an imperative.

Imaginary Interviews: F.A. Hayek Discusses His Warning to the West, The Road to Serfdom

The late F.A. Hayek 

I was introduced to the ideas of Friedrich August von Hayek (1899–1992) in the mid-1980s through his book The Road to Serfdom. Hayek was an Austrian-born British economist and philosopher known for his contributions to political economy, poitical philosophy and intellectual history. In 1974 he shared the 1974 the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with Gunnar Myrdal for work on money and economic fluctuations, and the interdependence of economic, social and institutional phenomena.

Living in Western Europe gave him a front row seat to the most turbulent poliical upheavals of the 20th century. He witnessed both the rise of Nazi Germany and Soviet Union, and ultimately their demise.

When I read his book 40 years ago, I was unaware that he was still alive. Today, unable to interview him but eager to still ask questions, I created this imaginary interview in order to resurrect and share his ideas with a wider audience. You will notice his use of the word liberalism, which had a very different meaning a century ago than it does now. Liberalism used to mead small government plus free markets and individual freedom. Liberalism today mean government activism, social programs and progressive reforms.  

Please forgive me for the length of this interview. Professor Hayek was far more loquacious than I had anticipated.

EN: Professor Hayek, when you began writing The Road to Serfdom during the Second World War, what personal concerns or observations compelled you to warn Western democracies about the dangers of centralized economic planning?

FAH: Ah, my dear interlocutor, it is a pleasure to engage in this dialogue, even across the veil of time. You ask about the genesis of The Road to Serfdom, that modest volume I penned amid the thunder of the Second World War. Allow me to reflect, as I might have in one of my lectures at the London School of Economics or in conversation with a thoughtful student.

I began sketching the ideas in the late 1930s, but the book took shape during the war years, from about 1940 to 1943, while I was in Cambridge, evacuated from London due to the Blitz. What compelled me? It was not mere academic fancy, but a profound unease born of observation and experience. You see, I had fled Vienna in 1931, witnessing firsthand the erosion of liberty in Central Europe—the Anschluss in 1938 only confirmed what I feared. But it was in Britain, that bastion of freedom, where I saw the true peril emerging.

The war had unleashed a fervor for planning: intellectuals, politicians, even well-meaning liberals, clamored for centralized control of the economy to win the fight against Hitler. "We must plan for victory," they said, and then "plan for peace." Yet I observed how this mirrored the very paths taken by Germany and Russia. In Germany, the socialists of the chair—the Kathedersozialisten—had paved the way for National Socialism not through malice, but through the illusion that experts could direct society like a machine. In Russia, the Bolsheviks' five-year plans had led straight to the gulags. I feared that the West, in imitating these methods to combat fascism, would unwittingly tread the same road to serfdom.

My concern was personal, yes: as an exile, I cherished the individual freedoms that Britain and America embodied—the rule of law, spontaneous order, the market's humble coordination of human endeavors. But I saw these under siege from within. Collectivist ideas, fashionable among the elite, promised equality and security but demanded the surrender of choice to a central authority. Who would wield that power? Not angels, but men, fallible and ambitious. And once planning begins, it cannot stop at economics; it must encompass all life, lest dissent disrupt the plan. Thus, liberty withers.

I wrote not as a prophet of doom, but as a warning to friends: to remind them that the noble ends of social justice could not justify means that destroy the very conditions of freedom. The book was my plea—addressed to the socialists of all parties—to reconsider before it was too late. 

EN: You argue that well-intentioned economic planning can lead societies down a path toward authoritarianism and gradually erode individual freedom. What convinced you that this slide toward coercion was not merely theoretical but a real historical pattern?

Hayek in his lateryear

FAH: You put your finger on the very heart of the matter. I did not arrive at this conclusion from armchair speculation alone. I had watched the pattern unfold before my eyes, almost like a tragic experiment repeated in different laboratories.

Let me speak plainly, as I would have in 1944 or in my later reflections.

1. Germany 
   In the 1920s and early 1930s almost every German professor of economics and sociology (men I had studied under or argued with) believed that the age of liberalism was over and that comprehensive planning was both inevitable and morally superior. The National Socialists did not invent planning; they inherited it. The Weimar Republic had already created cartels, price controls, huge public-works schemes, and a centralized “economic general staff.” When Hitler came to power in 1933 he simply took over the existing machinery and turned the dial from persuasion to terror. The same civil servants who had been enthusiastic planners under the Social Democrats and the Centre Party continued their work under the swastika. The road was continuous; only the pace changed.
2. Soviet Russia.
   The Bolsheviks began with the noblest proclamations (peace, land, bread, equality). Within a few years the “war communism” of 1918–1921 had already shown where central direction leads: requisitions, forced labour, the shooting of peasants who hid grain. Lenin himself admitted in 1921 that they had gone too far and introduced the NEP as a tactical retreat. Yet even that retreat was abandoned under Stalin, and the same logic (the Plan must be fulfilled at all costs) produced the Ukrainian famine and the Great Terror. The coercion was not an accident; it was the necessary consequence of trying to allocate all resources from one centre.
3. Britain herself, during the war and immediately after.
   By 1942 Britain had rationing, price controls, manpower direction, industrial conscription, and a Ministry of Food that decided what every citizen could eat. These measures were accepted as temporary necessities for total war. Yet almost overnight the Labour Party’s 1945 manifesto promised to make most of them permanent in peacetime: nationalisation of coal, railways, steel, the Bank of England, and “the planning of investment.” Distinguished men such as Beveridge and the Webbs spoke of the “planned society” as the next moral advance. I saw the same intellectual climate I had seen in Vienna and Berlin twenty years earlier, only now wearing a British tweed jacket instead of a brown or red shirt.

What struck me most forcibly was the identical sequence in each case:

• First, a moral revulsion against the inequalities and apparent chaos of the market.
• Then, the demand that “production must be for use, not for profit.”
• Then, the creation of a central plan and the administrative boards to execute it.
• Then, inevitably, the discovery that people will not voluntarily obey the plan.
• Finally, the replacement of voluntary cooperation by coercion, and the concentration of all power in the hands of those who control the plan.

This was no mere analogy; it was the same process driven by the same internal logic. The ends may differ (one party calls itself National Socialist, another democratic socialist), but once you accept the premise that the state must direct the economic process in detail, the destination becomes almost inevitable.

That is why I insisted the danger was not from evil men, but from good men who believed they could achieve admirable goals by methods that necessarily destroy freedom. History had already run the experiment three times in my lifetime. I merely reported the results.

EN: Many readers interpret The Road to Serfdom as an endorsement of laissez-faire capitalism. How would you clarify your actual position on the role of government, especially regarding social safety nets and regulation?

FAH: You touch upon the most persistent and, if I may say so, most exasperating misreading of the book. I have been called everything from a Manchester liberal to an “apostle of laissez-faire” by critics who evidently skimmed the dedication page and stopped there. Let me set the record straight with the care I tried to exercise in the text itself.

I am not, and never was, an advocate of laissez-faire in the nineteenth-century caricature sense. I stated this quite explicitly in Chapter VI (“Planning and the Rule of Law”) and again in Chapter IX (“Security and Freedom”), yet somehow the nuance is still lost on many friends as well as foes.

My position, then and now, is this:

The indispensable framework: A functioning market order requires a carefully thought-out legal framework that only the state can supply: clear and general rules of property, contract, tort, and fraud; an independent judiciary; sound money (preferably secured by a rule rather than discretionary management); and the prevention of monopoly, especially monopoly created by government itself. This is not “minimal” government; it is government discharging its most essential and most difficult task.

The proper sphere of coercion: The state may legitimately use coercion to enforce those general rules and to provide certain services that the market cannot supply at all or cannot supply in sufficient quantity (what we now call public goods). I have always accepted national defence, police, basic sanitation, and measures against contagious diseases as obvious examples.

A limited but real social minimum: I wrote, in the very book that is accused of opposing it, that there is “no reason why in a society that has reached the general level of wealth which ours has attained … the assurance of a certain minimum income for everyone, or a sort of floor below which nobody need fall even when he is unable to provide for himself, should not appear as a wholly legitimate protection against risks common to all.”

I repeated this in the 1956 preface and again in The Constitution of Liberty (1960). What I insisted upon was only that such a minimum be provided outside the market, on a uniform basis to all who fall below it, and not be used as an excuse to control the whole economic process. A guaranteed minimum compatible with freedom is perfectly possible; a system that tries to guarantee relative position or specific outcomes is not.

1. The danger of “planning” versus the legitimacy of rules
   The fatal step is the substitution of central direction of particular economic activities for a framework of general rules. Price controls, production quotas, investment licensing, industrial nationalization, and the like inevitably lead to discrimination, privilege, and the suppression of dissent. That is what I called “the road to serfdom.”
   
   By contrast, general regulations (e.g., building codes, pure-food laws, working-hours limits, anti-pollution standards) that apply equally to all and merely set the boundaries within which individuals plan their own lives are entirely compatible with a free society.
   
   
2. Competition as a discovery procedure
   I do not worship the market; I regard it as the only known mechanism that enables millions of separate individuals, each with dispersed and tacit knowledge, to coordinate their plans without anyone needing to comprehend the whole. The alternative is not wise planning but ignorance masquerading as omniscience.

In short, I am a defender neither of unrestrained capitalism nor of the welfare state as it has often developed. I am a defender of the liberal order of law, limited government, and the open society—one that can and should provide a decent safety net, but must never be allowed to degenerate into the totalitarian temptation of trying to plan the details of everyone’s life “for their own good.”

If that makes me a friend of freedom rather than a friend of any particular “-ism,” I shall wear the label gladly.

EN: During the four decades that followed publication of this book, did you see things in the U.S. that alarmed you, that gave you the impression that we were marching down a wrong path here?

FAH: Ah, America… the country that received The Road to Serfdom with such unexpected enthusiasm in 1944–45, and yet, over the decades that followed, often caused me the deepest unease.

Yes, I did see unmistakable signs that even the United States, for all its magnificent constitutional safeguards and its instinctive love of liberty, was drifting in the very direction I had warned against. I said so repeatedly, sometimes gently in lectures, sometimes more bluntly in interviews and prefaces. Let me mention the developments that most disturbed me.

1. The steady expansion of the administrative state
   When I first visited America in the 1920s and again after the war, the federal government was still relatively small and its interventions episodic. By the late 1960s and 1970s, however, I watched with dismay as agency after agency (EPA, OSHA, EEOC, CPSC, and dozens more) acquired quasi-legislative and quasi-judicial powers. Laws became ever vaguer (“clean air,” “fair housing,” “consumer protection”), delegating to bureaucrats the authority to write thousands of pages of specific commandments and to punish infractions without the old safeguards of the common law. This is precisely the replacement of the Rule of Law by administrative discretion that I described in Chapter VI as the hallmark of the road to serfdom.
   
   
2. The Great Society and the belief in “fine-tuning”
   President Johnson’s programmes, and later the ambition of both parties to manage the economy through deficit spending, wage-and-price controls (Nixon 1971–74!), and ever more detailed regulation of industry, reminded me strongly of the British planning euphoria of 1945. The underlying assumption was the same: that a handful of clever people in Washington could know enough to direct the lives of 200 million citizens better than those citizens could direct themselves. The results, inflation, stagflation, the energy crises, were not accidental; they were the predictable fruits of suppressing the price mechanism.
   
   
3. The growth of the transfer state and the erosion of personal responsibility
   I have never opposed a decent social minimum, as I said earlier. But when transfer payments grow until they become the chief occupation of a large part of the electorate, and when benefits are made conditional on particular behaviours decreed from above (housing subsidies that dictate where you may live, medical subsidies that dictate what treatments doctors may offer), the citizen is no longer free. By the 1970s I could already see the beginnings of what Tocqueville had feared: a soft despotism that administers people “for their own good” and gradually infantilises them.
   
   
4. The intellectual climate
   Perhaps most alarming of all was the capture of the universities and the media by a new generation that regarded the very idea of economic freedom as obsolete or immoral. By the time I received the Nobel Prize in 1974, it was fashionable in many American campuses to treat profit, competition, and even private property with open contempt. I found myself having to remind audiences that the alternative to profit is not virtue, but political allocation; and that political allocation inevitably favors the powerful and the articulate.

I must in fairness add that America retained enormous strengths that Europe largely lost: federalism, a written constitution that is still taken seriously, a vigorous civil society, and above all a population that instinctively distrusts government. These acted as brakes. Yet the direction of travel from the New Deal through the Great Society to the regulatory explosion of the 1970s was unmistakable.

In my last visits, especially after the publication of the three volumes of Law, Legislation and Liberty (1973–1979), I warned Americans that they were perhaps thirty or forty years behind Western Europe on the same path, but that the path was nevertheless the same. I hoped, and still hope, that the American constitutional tradition and the American character might yet reverse the trend before the point of no return is reached.

That, my friend, was my sober assessment when I last looked upon your great republic with living eyes.

EN: Thank you, sir, for your invaluable insights.

This interview was created in collaboration with Grok, an X.com LLM. Essentially, I asked Grok to channel the ideas of Friedrich Hayek as he wrote and spoke in the 1940s-1980s, precise, courteous, slightly formal English with a faint Austrian cadence, deeply principled but never shrill, and always ready to draw distinctions that others overlook.