Why were you in China?” asked the passport control officer, a woman with the appearance and disposition of a prison matron.

“None of your business,” I said.

Her eyes widened in disbelief.

“Excuse me?” she asked.

“I’m not going to be interrogated as a pre-condition of re-entering my own country,” I said.

This did not go over well.

Many of the commenters took issue with my rude tone toward the CBP officers. This criticism is profoundly misguided.

To the authoritarian mind, there are only two responses to a demand: submission or defiance, and anything less than total submission is defiance.

Let me start with a socialist axiom … : freedom cannot flourish without equality and equality does not exist without freedom.

While logically and philosophically inseparable, equality and liberty have followed different and even opposed trajectories. For liberalism, freedom in its negative and positive forms is primary. Negative freedom is captured in Hobbes's statement that liberty is the absence of "external impediments". The positive "freedom to", on the other hand, was classically defined by Isaiah Berlin: "I wish my life and decisions to depend on myself, not on external forces of whatever kind … to be the instrument of my own, not of other men's acts of will."

Anarchism, the name given to a struggle for a society characterised by the ability of each actor to have a say in outcomes proportionate to the degree they are affected by them.