<i>This piece has appeared as a guest column in the CW</I>


“It’s a free country,” is a common, snarky response to both doubting fellows seeking approval for their actions and preening egotists who think they know best. The phrase encapsulates American political culture: that neither brute nor egghead can tell a citizen a citizen what to do, that everyday people concerned with practical things don’t owe a lick of deference to agents of the state, armed with guns or PhDs.

But, we must ask, is it? Is America a free country? Certainly we citizens enjoy great amounts of freedom, but are we increasingly pawns manipulated by our government in the name of “social justice”? Ask yourself these questions:

How can an adult citizen – who can own property, own a weapon, vote, and die in the military - be charged as a “minor” in possession of alcohol?

How can an adult twenty year old citizen buy an AR15, be able to be entrusted with an automatic weapon by the Army, and yet not be allowed to purchase a handgun? Why are citizens subjected to asking permission of the State to carry their own property in the service of the fundamental right of self defense, even despite a clear, constitutional “shall not be infringed”?

Why is it that most speech is considered free, but speech about politics near election time is subject to myriad rules? Why can a citizen be fined and potentially jailed for having the gall to use his own dime to mention a candidate’s name on the airwaves near election time?

Why is everything from Washington nowadays “comprehensive,” “mandatory,” and “necessary”? Why can we not keep our own earnings, plan our own retirement, educate our own children, make sick or well our own bodies, keep our own lives private, or so often defend our own families without some busy-body from government at all levels telling us Yes, No, or Maybe-So?

The stark and sole answer to these questions is that we have given up so many of our private choices to government at all levels, and so many of our public choices best handled by communities, the several states, and/or hardly at all have been handed to or usurped by a federal government with a self serving, centralist worldview and insufficient knowledge of and deftness about local issues. Nine out of ten Amendments in the Bill of Rights are regularly abrogated, to the detriment of everyone’s right and responsibility to make one’s own decisions. Soldiers aren’t being quartered in our homes, but agents of the state have a presence in almost every document we put our name on and in every product we bring home (or are forbidden from so doing).

We can be arrested now for more violations of the law than at any time in our past: when was the last time Americans could openly drink a beer, sit around a beach bonfire, or so much as have a Swiss Army knife in a sports stadium without viewing the presence of a police officer as a source of worry? America is in a sorry state; I, for one, don’t see anything getting better.