What about Carrier? The president-elect of the United States decided in a purely ad hoc basis that he wanted Carrier to remain in Indiana. He deployed some combination of carrots and sticks at his disposal to lever Carrier into doing what he wanted. Implicitly or explicitly, there must have been sticks, as press accounts suggest that the tax benefits provided offset only a small part of the savings forgone by staying in Indiana. It is not hard to see from the point of view of United Technologies, the parent of Carrier, that for a company with more than $50 billion in revenue it’s surely worth $60 million to not be on the wrong side of a possibly vindictive president of the United States.

It seems to me what we have just witnessed is an act of ad hoc deal capitalism and, worse yet, its celebration as a model. As with the air traffic controllers, only a negligible sliver of the economy is involved, but there is huge symbolic value. A principle is being established: It is good for the president to try to figure out what people want and lean on companies to give it to them. Predictability and procedure are less important than getting the right result at the right time. Like Hong Kong, as mainland China increasingly imposes its will, we may have taken a first step toward a kind of reverse transition from rule of law capitalism to ad hoc deal-based capitalism…

Some of the worst abuses of power are not those that leaders inflict on their people. They are the acts that the people demand from their leaders. I fear in a way that is more fundamental than a bad tax policy or tariff we have started down the road of changing the operating assumptions of our capitalism. I hope I am wrong, but I expect that as a consequence we are going to be not only poorer but less free.