Freedom from constraint by others (negative liberty) is more urgent or basic, he argued, than freedom to realise your potential (positive liberty).

ECONOMIST: Isaiah Berlin

If Congress imposes a hard budget constraint on itself by refusing to raise the debt ceiling and establishes Social Security and interest on the debt as priority must-pays out of revenues before any other programs may be funded, it would require total other, non-priority spending to be reduced not quite one-third on average during the next ten years.

FORBES: Enough Is Enough On Raising The Federal Debt Limit

The third constraint, felt also by other rich-country governments, is growing popular disenchantment with free trade.

ECONOMIST: The battle in Seattle

Even normally cautious bodies like the International Energy Agency and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development are sounding the alarm, with the latter recently releasing a comprehensive report forecasting a world in 2050 that will be defined by resource constraint and its economic impacts.

CNN: The Earth is full

That constraint will instead be applied by the providers themselves, through the limitations that they place on access.

FORBES: The New Obamacare Insurance Is Looking More Like Medicaid

Like the movie business, the games business is limited by the bandwidth-constraint online, but it has more flexibility to get around the problem.

ECONOMIST: Games and the Internet go well together

Many of those choices are manufactured to better segment the consumer market, some can be offloaded to experts to make on our behalf and some can be limited by self-imposed constraint.

FORBES: Forget Apple's iPad, Publishers Need To Worry About Tigers

From the point of view of saving a given consumer the most amount of money by allowing him or her to pick and choose their channels, bundling seems like a burdensome constraint.

NPR: World Bank Changes, Understanding Unemployment