The United States has been steadily moving away from the freedom of peaceful action that was the norm from the Founding until roughly the 1930s and into a new regime where all kinds of peaceful conduct must first be cleared by government officials. Alexis de Tocqueville warned that it was in this manner that liberty would be lost and he was so right.
In this AIER article, Paul Schwennensen writes about his encounter with local government minions over his failure to get their approval for a tent in his back yard. Amazingly (or maybe not), an arrest warrant was issued for him over his noncompliance.
He writes, “We have a real crisis on our hands in the form of basic property rights arrogation. In an age of ‘epic crisis,’ it’s difficult to know what looming threats are real and which are hyped fantasy, but this one surely tops the list, if for no other reason than that it is so subtly devious: zoning rules have been quietly adopted nationwide and have led inexorably to administrative despotism and bureaucratic sclerosis. This isn’t just irritating red tape, it is a reflection of basic freedom lost.”
He’s right. Freedom in America has been dying the death of a thousand cuts for the last 90 years and the cuts are coming more and more rapidly these days. And productive people have to pay taxes to support bureaucrats whose work consists of getting in the way of people who want to exercise their liberty.
Read the whole thing.