A lot of people are under the impression that freedom will die in wartime or during some sort of national duress. It is true that this is indeed ground predisposed to anti-freedom dissent; however, the poisonous seeds and most of the dying process occur before the stress hits.
How so? Well, if a society truly prizes freedom, it followsthat nothing would be able to tear it from its hands, not even a national emergency. Moreover, national emergencies, as a rule, are rare, so one must pay the greatest share of attention to those larger lapses in between--those tracts of peace and prosperity--because there is more time here for poison to spread slowly and subtly without notice. National emergencies tend to be shorter and thus necessitate more daring, quick moves, which doesn't favor statists and wannabe tyrants.
There is an amazing, beautiful, miraculous correlation between freedom and prosperity. When individuals of a society are left somewhat to their own devices, comfort and wealth follow relatively quickly, and the more they are left on their own, the greater is the wealth and prosperity--but the instant comfort becomes the desired target, and not freedom, both will disappear.
Freedom, I fear, died in America a while ago, and has already begun to decay. I see this decay when petulant whiners opine dramatically about the negative effects of second-hand smoke in restaurants or the plight of the uninsured. I hear it when people sit back jovially and talk fashionably of how people, if left without supervision, will do stupid things and aren't smart enough to know what they ought to do. I feel it when President Obama lives under the distinct impression that individual entrepreneurial drive's importance in the economy is overplayed, or when the red-state farmer argues in favor of ethanol subsidies and continuing to feed the agricultural hog that devours our greenback slops.
We here in America have had it so easy for so long that we find it necessary to turn our governing energies to stomping out cigarettes in bars or mandating minimum wages and so on and so forth... the drivel piles high. I see the towering stack in my nightmares. This is what happens when sanctimony or pride is given too free of a reign during peace--the peace and prosperity, and sheer comfort, become priority number one. This is what killed freedom--and killing freedom will eventually kill us.
Freedom didn't die in the name of safety. It died in the name of comfort and petty preferences.
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