This week, the European Union decided to go ahead with an agreement with Mercosur, the South American common market. It’s a victory for free trade.
I owe much to the European Union and the liberties it has brought have made a big positive impact on my life. The basic laws and the philosophy behind the European Union are based on classical liberal principles.
There are problems with how those laws are implemented. American conservatives point out that Europea isn’t as free a place as the United States and they can point to, for example, problems with free speech on the continent. Long-running indices that systematically track freedoms in different countries paint a different picture. The US-based Freedom in the World index by Freedom House assigns a rating of 89 to France and Italy and a rating of 95 to Germany. It assigns a rating of 84 to the United States. There’s also a freedom of press index, and again Europe is doing fine.
Nehaveigur 