Editor of Dispatches from the Rebellion — a weekly newsletter covering freedom movements around the world. After 25 years in IT, I’ve dedicated my life to telling the stories of those risking everything for freedom. Each issue delivers sharp global updates, threats to American democracy, and profiles of the heroes fighting back. If you believe freedom is worth fighting for — you're in the right place.
The Dictator Who Exposed Democracy’s Fatal Flaw
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Hello Reader, What I'm Watching
Democracy's Existential ThreatBut I'm especially tracking France, where Emanual Macron's surrendering his signature pension reform—raising retirement age from 62 to 64—to avoid his government's collapse, the fourth in under a year. He's capitulating to Socialist demands (never a good idea) after ramming the law through using constitutional override powers. France joins Italy and Spain in retreating from pension reforms under political pressure, exposing democracy's core failure: funding promises to current voters without bankrupting the next generation. American and European governments believed that they could always afford to support the poor and the needy: widows, orphans, the old and homeless, disadvantaged minorities, unwed mothers. Their sociologists expounded the theory that hardship and failure were due not to the individual person's character, but to flaws in the economic system. So charity became "entitlement," and the stigma of living on charity disappeared. Unfortunately, welfare costs grew faster than the government's ability to raise taxes to pay for it. The political cost of tax increases is high. Governments took the easy way out by borrowing to give higher benefits to the current generation of voters, instead of building up reserves for the next. Eventually, this led to budget deficits, high inflation, and unemployment.
In Singapore, we made the opposite choice. We insisted that we could only spend what we had earned. We had to maintain a hard-working, thrifty, and resilient people, and to do that, we made welfare a dirty word. Each generation had to build for the next, and we made sure our reserves were not squandered. The result was that when a crisis came, we had something to fall back on. We avoided the debilitating dependency culture that had sapped the vitality of many developed societies.
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Eric Erdman
Editor of Dispatches from the Rebellion — a weekly newsletter covering freedom movements around the world. After 25 years in IT, I’ve dedicated my life to telling the stories of those risking everything for freedom. Each issue delivers sharp global updates, threats to American democracy, and profiles of the heroes fighting back. If you believe freedom is worth fighting for — you're in the right place.
For nearly three decades in the fifth century BCE, the great empires of Athens and Sparta tore at each other across the Aegean. Sparta — the dominant land power, the established hegemon — had watched Athens rise into a wealthy naval empire and feared what it had become. The Peloponnesian War that followed defined the ancient world. New here? You're reading Dispatches from the Rebellion — independent reporting on the global fight for freedom. Subscribe Free When Donald Trump arrived in Beijing...
New here? You're reading Dispatches from the Rebellion — independent reporting on the global fight for freedom. Subscribe Free The Global Fight for Freedom Children jumping deliriously, waving American flags. The CIA director opposite the grandson of a revolutionary. Rooftops where families sleep to escape the heat. A young woman running back through prison gates to kiss her mentor goodbye. This week, the struggle spans three continents. A rising power that isn't rising. A regime running out...
United Arab Emirates - Freedom House Freedom Score: 18 (Not Free) On April 28, the third-largest producer in the world’s largest cartel announced its exit. Effective May 1, the UAE left OPEC— without consulting Saudi Arabia, the kingdom that has driven OPEC since 1960.The strategic logic: Iran has been a founding OPEC member for 66 years, using the cartel as a venue for international legitimacy even under crushing sanctions. Now the table tilts harder against Tehran on every future production...