Land of the Free and Home of the Brave: A Long Time Ago Now

SEE HERE You ought to be disturbed about this. If you aren't it must be because you're one of those proverbial frogs slowly being boiled to death. By the way, that isn't true — the frogs will jump out of the pan. But it might be true for people. We've been slowly conditioned to a web of unreasonable and unconstitutional and frankly crazy laws that have turned the world upside down. When I was a boy everyone I knew carried a scout knife. Today you can be suspended from school for possessing a scout knife. That's crazy! Freedom includes the freedom to do things that other people don't always like or think are crazy as long as you're not endangering them. "Mumbly peg" would be illegal today I guess. The argument that not wearing a seat belt or a helmet might increase my insurance costs and things like that are not a reasonable basis for limiting my freedom. That is just a cost of freedom. Do you really want to live in the locked down, uptight, ultimate nanny state where they are metering your breathing to make sure your carbon footprint is within spec? That's the track we're on if we don't wake up. I don't seriously think we'll get there. The whole system will collapse first. Government is like a huge flywheel on the engine of collective productivity. Once it gets too large it stalls the engine and everything else stops working. We're pretty near the stall point.