The world’s least-free country

Backwoods Home Magazine ^ | Sept/Oct 2002 | John Silveira

[SkyRat]

Socialists love drugs because a free republic cannot be maintained if its citizens are stoned or drunk

Interessting logic.

A free republic cannot be maintained if its citizens are stoned or drunk.
Therefor, a free republic has to be a minimum of drug & alcohol laws?

Is that true? If so, was the USA a free republic before it adopted the WOD or not? Was the US a free republic while it had it's Alcohol prohibition, before the prohibition or now?

"Through clever and constant application of propaganda, people can be made to see paradise as hell, and also the other way around, to consider the most wretched sort of life as paradise."
-- Adolf Hitler - "Mein Kampf" - (1926)

[watcher1]

Think about it, and you should agree that this freedom, to pursue happiness, is quite powerful and greatly underrated.

Your neighbor and you are using canadian logic, ie to come from a place of no freedom to a place of some freedom is paradise.

We are a lot less free today than we were 50 or 100 years ago.

The Founders are rolling in their graves

[HIDEK6]

Oh, I do agree with you. I only wanted to point out something that a great many overlook.

[watcher1]

Are you a 'libertarian'?

I'm a registered Republican

[gunnedah]

Most definately it bothers me. The government takes more and more of our rights away daily.Those running the government in a lot of cases have their own little kingdom in which to rule and oppress.Our elected officials are selling government jobs and kingdoms left and right.If the American public had the ability to follow the money trail it would amaze you how we are being sold out and governed from within.
Folks I am affraid it is later than most of us think or are willing to admit.

[watcher1]

I am affraid it is later than most of us think or are willing to admit.

I don't know where we will be in 25 or 50 years.
If the trend we're on continues, we will have even less freedom that we do today
A lot less freedom

[rdb3]

Don't look at it that way

I wish I could look at it that way, but I can't. History won't allow it.

You say 50 to 100 years ago. Okay. How can I look at either 1952 or 1902 without looking at the scourge of Jim Crow?

This reminds me of a debate I had with a libertarian here about who said that this nation used to be a libertarian nation. I argued with him the same way I am with you now. I asked him, if it were a libertarian nation, it was a libertarian nation for whom? It most certainly wasn't a libertarian nation for everybody, especially my forebears.

That's a hard, cold, brutal fact.

I look at the freedom argument like a girl who is a little bit pregnant. She either is or she isn't. No middle ground whatsoever.

To say that this nation was free is a gross lie. But still, it is the greatest nation on earth.

[Congressman Billybob]

Actually, the tax rates from Britain on the Colonies was much less than the 5% figure you give. The Commerce Department published a major reference set in 1976 entitled "Bicentennial Statistics." It included the taxes collected by Britain from the American Colonies.

Those taxes were highest in 1774, when the Stamp Act was in place. That was repealed before the start of the Revolution. That source also shows the annual support for British Missionaries in the US (a good index for a lower middle-class income). It was 15 pounds per year.

When you divide the total taxes by the number of people (3 million at the time), and apply that to a middle-class income (Missionary family support rate), you get a tax rate of 0.1% That is NOT a misprint. The tax rate was 0.1% Add in the fact that about two-thirds of the "Americans" at the time did not use money, but were working on a barter system. Import-export taxes wouldn't reach them. So, triple the tax rate to 0.3% for those who had cash.

THAT is the REAL tax rate for which we went to war against Britain. Today we pay federal taxes alone that are 100 times as high as a percent of total income, as we did in 1774. Makes you wonder what we won, when we defeated KIing George III, don't it?

Congressman Billybob

Click for latest column: "Memo to CBS about Bill Clinton."

Click for latest book: "to Restore Trust in America"

[G.Mason]

"The Founders are rolling in their graves"

Please note: The population of the entire 13 Colonies in 1775 was approximately 2,500,000.

If you have to ask what that figure means with reference to the many laws of today you need to further your education.

BTW...I just loved your whining about the "Blacks and American Indians".

I was so taken by it my family and I are on the way to the cemetery to urinate on our kinsmen's graves.

[medved]

OK, so what about the other 95%

Let's just talk about the drug laws since that appears to be the biggest problem. 140 Years ago America didn't have any drug laws and it didn't have any drug problems and you'd think that was simple enough to figure out, but the problem is that we have some much more evil drugs now than they did then, and you can't just legalize all of it. A rational approach to drugs would:

• Legalize anything demonstrably no more harmful than booze (marijuana and all its derivatives etc.) on the same basis as booze.
• Keep heroin and similar highly addictive but otherwise relatively harmless stuff illegal on the street while letting addicts shoot up for 25 cents at govt. sites, i.e. take every dime out of it for the criminals.
• Keep the real Jeckyl/Hyde formulas like PCP and LSD illegal forever. Crack cocaine or anything else which there was no possibility whatever of anybody breaking off of would remain in this category.

Do all of that, and 99% of America's drug problems would vanish in two years.

[SkyRat]

It would seem that 54% of Britons would not agree with your statement.

Might be so. I can't talk in numbers. Also I usually dont include the Britons when I say European. They seem to be insulted.

Anyway, as I said I don't have numbers. But my own opinion is, if you take the last uh 50 years or so, many from Germany, France, Holland and who-knows-where would have given their right arm to leave Europe and move to America. Because, they thought America was the land of personal freedom. But today? Why move? What can you have in America what you dont have here? Especially, what freedom's can you enjoy, that you don't get in Europe?

After 9/11 it's even worse. I talked with someone from Eastern Germany about the TIPS system some time ago. He said, he see's no difference between those two. Well, what can I say? He lived with Stasi Spy's, I didn't. I don't know if he is right or not.

That's the impression I get. I know several American Citizens who hide in countrys like Holland cos their already had encounters with the law. Only dope heads, of course, but in holland those are free and working dope heads, in America they would sit behind bars. Wich country is the land of the free?

[STD]

Boy did you ever hit it on the head. Massive peasant immigration will be the death of us!

[STD]

No drugs involved. Lariam alert! That should really make you shudder.

[Kevin Curry]

So which country has the most laws regulating its citizenry? After looking high and low I discovered that the country with the most laws—not just today, but in all of history is...geez Louise, it’s the United States. We not only have the most laws in all of history, but we also turn out more new laws and regulations to manage our people every single year than most countries turn out in decades.

The number of laws and regulations on the books is absolutely staggering, this is true. We have a system of lawmaking that is warped by societal expectations so that any particular legislator is accounted "successful" only if he or she gets new laws passed.

However, it is foolish to count up the raw number of laws on the books and draw the simplistic conclusion that the more number of laws there are, the less free we are. Logically that would mean the ideal state of "freedom" is to be found in a society that has no laws, i.e., a state of anarchy.

Anyone who cast into and survives a state of anarchy will readily tell you that anarchy provides the least amount of freedom to a people.

Freedom is much more than the state of being able theoretically to do anything one chooses to do. It is the state of being able to live, prosper, and find happiness among one's fellow citizens. In a civilized society a framework of laws that are applicable to everyone is absolutely essential to that end. It can well be argued that the more complex as society becomes, the more laws are necessary to properly channel and control the complex forces at work in that society to free up the citizen to live happily and prosper within it.

The trick is find that state of equipoise between necessary laws that actually maximize the freedom of a people, and unnecessary and countereffective laws that unduly restrict and infantalize them.

[watcher1]

Lariam alert
LOL!

[redhead]

"What a stupid, brainless argument for 'freedom'. This guy's mind is already dilated on drugs."

True. I used to subscribe to "BACKWOODS HOME" magazine, and Silveria has always been a crank. Whatever his topic, he's AGAINST it. An accomplished whiner.

[CWRWinger]

Nuts, I thought I had a real libertarian here.

[PistolPaknMama]

Comparing the USA to north korea or iraq isn't fair. I think we should compare ourselves to how we were ( say 50 or 100 years ago) to how we are now.

I agree with you completely. We are overburdened with laws and the regular guy on the street cannot keep up with what law he might be breaking today without daily monitoring Congress, his state legislature and county and city councils.

[billbears]

bump to that!!