I am on my first week of an annual tour I co-lead to Europe. Some random thoughts. I hope that urban density, apartment living, Smart cars, and motorbikes are not the envisioned future of the United States. For all our perceived sins, the American with his suburban house and yard, and pickup and boat, enjoys a freedom of choice and ease unmatched anywhere-and unappreciated in most surveys of comparable standards of living. That autonomy in private life translates into a freewheeling, unpredictable electorate, about all we have left of the modern equivalent of the homestead farmer of the nineteenth century....
