Monty Pelerin / EconomicNoise.com

Every incursion against freedom is small and seems insignificant. It is usually justified by “improving” something or another. Yet freedom must not be traded for expediency, convenience or comfort. Small infringements mount and build upon prior ones. They accelerate when they become a way of “solving” problems. Ultimately, the process turns into an all-out assault.

W. Somerset Maugham understood the primacy of freedom and stated the issue of compromising it:

Continuous theft of freedom ends in tyranny. In a previous article the loss of freedom and the rise of tyranny was described as a process that dangerously numbs the populace. The US is well into that process. The Heritage Foundation ranks the US as “mostly free:”

The United States, with an economic freedom score of 76, has lost ground again in the 2013 Index. Its score is 0.3 point lower than last year, with declines in monetary freedom, business freedom, labor freedom, and fiscal freedom.

America has fallen to tenth place on their freedom scale behind Chile and barely ahead of Bahrain and Estonia.

Each use of freedom as a bargaining chip for some imagined benefit is a step closer to tyranny. It is a fraudulent trade engineered by the State. Edmund Burke described the basis of such trades:

People never give up their liberties but under some delusion.

Bookworm Room discussed the current condition of the nation and the changes over time. They concluded that we passed the any level of freedom (i.e., reached levels of non-freedom) that our Founders would never have tolerated. Just in the span of my lifetime the changes are shocking. Here is part of their commentary:

continue article at Economic Noise:

http://www.economicnoise.com/2013/08/15/preying-not-governing/