The world’s least-free country

Here’s a quiz: Which is the freest country on earth? The answer’s easy. It’s the United States. Ask anyone. And why are we the freest? Not because we’re the richest. Long before we became the world’s richest nation we still regarded ourselves as the freest, and millions flocked to our shores to enjoy that freedom. The reasons we are free are: First, because of the philosophical basis upon which this country was founded. It is assumed that individuals have rights, e.g., free speech, the right to bear arms, the right of a jury trial before our peers should the government try to imprison us, seize our property, or deprive us of our lives, etc. Second, we have a Constitution that limits the powers of a central government to intrude into our lives.

And third, our rights have been enshrined in the First 10 Amendments to our Constitution.

Many other countries, like England and Canada, also have their own Bill of Rights, but those rights are at the pleasure of the government. It says so right in their laws. So they are not “unalienable” rights. Only our country, in all of history, was founded on the assumption that the individual has rights that exist apart from the government and not at its pleasure. Then, in 1868, the Constitution was amended to say that even the states cannot violate our unalienable rights. Pretty powerful stuff. These things form the basis of our freedom and are the reasons why the United States is the freest country on earth.

So if we can identify the freest country, can we also identify that which is the least free? I’ve tried to find a qualitative way to make that determination, but it’s difficult, because no country has a constitution that guarantees tyranny. Even the constitutions of the old Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China read as if those countries were free. You’d never have guessed that what happened under Stalin and Mao could have happened, just from reading those documents. (Of course, you’d never have guessed we once enslaved a huge portion of our own citizens or screwed the Indians out of a large portion of a continent by reading our Constitution. But that’s another story.)

What I’m getting at is it’s hard to determine qualitatively which is the least free country on earth. So I decided to see if there is a quantitative way to measure it. I found two. First, the country with the most laws would be a candidate for that which is least free. Laws regulate people, so the country which is the least free would surely regulate its people the most. Second, the country with the greatest percentage of its population in jail would also be a candidate for the least free, for obvious reasons. And, if, by chance, some country not only had the most laws but also had the largest percentage of its own population behind bars, we’d at least have a candidate for the least free country on the planet.

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.

How can it be that the world’s freest country needs more laws to tell its people what to do than the Soviet Union, Red China, Nazi Germany, or any two-bit banana republic dictatorship? And it’s not like we’ve always had so many laws. Most of them are new. In 1814, when President Madison and the Congress fled Washington, DC, ahead of the invading English troops bent on arson, they took the papers of the federal government with them. It was easy. They loaded all the laws and regulations into a few boxes and left. This was all the federal government had generated to regulate us in the first 38 years of our existence. Today, Congress and anonymous bureaucrats generate more laws and regulations than that in minutes.

Maybe we should consider the other criterion. Which country imprisons the highest percentage of its own citizens? Let’s see, Russia’s up there. And so is the Union of South Africa. And there are some little potentates as we see in Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan. Hmm, but who leads the list. On, no! Folks, you’re not going to like this. It’s...it’s...the United States, again, heading the list of least free countries. The prime reason is the War on Drugs, the war waged against our country’s own citizens “for their own good.”

When I presented my results to others, some said if you obey the laws, you have nothing to worry about and you’ll still be free. I pointed out that that’s the case in every country. Toe the line and you won’t get in trouble. If the women in Afghanistan wore their burkas and didn’t drive or get an education, then by that definition they could still be free. I also pointed out that Jews in Nazi Germany, blacks in the postbellum South, and many American Indians did toe the line and tried to be good citizens but they still got screwed. So obeying the law doesn’t guarantee freedom.

Another said, despite all our laws, we have safeguards in that we have a jury system and that those laws are filtered through juries. I pointed out that more and more agencies regulate us without juries. E.g., the IRS, family courts, OSHA, the EPA, etc. don’t allow juries. And where juries are allowed the courts exclude people who realize they can nullify bad laws. This is hardly a recipe for freedom.

So, somehow, I have arrived at a paradox. What, on paper, would appear to be the freest society in the world appears, in practice, to be among the most oppressive.
Does this bother anyone besides me?

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)

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

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.

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.

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"

"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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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