we have given up liberty for an imagined bit of safety;

Benjamin Franklin stated, “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”

Would modern-day Americans do that? Would they give up liberty to purchase a little temporary safety?

There is no question about it. They already have. In fact, they have been doing it for their entire lives.

Consider the fact that we live under a government that has the omnipotent power to assassinate, torture, and indefinitely incarcerate without trial any American citizen. It goes without saying that anyone who lives under a regime that wields that type of total power cannot possibly be considered to be a free person, even if the power isn’t being exercised widely. The fact that the government just wields the power is enough to nullify freedom in that country.

It wasn’t always that way. For the first 150 years or so of America’s existence, the federal government lacked those totalitarian-like powers. That was made clear in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, which expressly forbade the federal government from killing people, including American citizens, without due process of law, from inflicting cruel and unusual punishments on people, such as torture, and from jailing people indefinitely without trial.

So, what happened? The American people in the 20th century became afraid, very afraid. They were afraid of the communists. They were convinced that Russia, China, North Korea, Cuba, North Vietnam, and other Red nations were coming to get them.

Thus, to purchase a little temporary safety, Americans acceded to the conversion of the federal government, with its limited powers, to a national-security state, with its omnipotent, totalitarian-like powers of assassination, torture, and indefinite detention.

The same phenomenon has occurred with the war on drugs. At one time, Americans were free to ingest whatever they wanted, including drugs. They understood that the right to ingest whatever they wanted was necessarily part and parcel of a free society..........more..........