Throughout history the two main enemies of human freedom have been criminals and the government. Government was instituted to protect our freedoms in person and property from being violated by criminals. The U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights were written as tools in protecting our freedoms from the government itself -- by binding the political officials down from mischief with the chains of explicit, written laws and rules of due process. But, the Constitution itself -- being only words on a piece of parchment -- does not have any way to enforce its own provisions if they are violated by government agents. No system of government made up of human beings will automatically restrict itself to its proper functions. Only if enough people -- human beings -- understand and give a damn about freedom and what it requires can it be preserved. The price of liberty is constant vigilance to keep government in its proper place.

The U.S. Government today is becoming more and more like those European regimes that our fathers and grandfathers went to war against in World War II. Peaceful citizens are being harassed -- and in some instances even murdered -- by Gestapo-like Federal goons from a national government that is way out of control.

Most Americans today take their freedoms for granted or, worse still, do not miss or even know the freedoms our country once afforded but which have been lost because of usurpations by Big Government. The following paragraph is a warning from the past which modern America ignores at the peril of what's left of our freedoms.

How To Identify Legal Thievery -- and What To Do About It: 

"The law can be an instrument of equalization only in so far as it takes from some persons what belongs to them and then gives it to other persons. But, when the law does this, it becomes an instrument of plunder -- legal plunder.

"How is legal plunder to be identified? Quite simply: See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them, and gives it to other persons to whom it does not belong. See if the law benefits one citizen or group of citizens at the expense of another citizen or group of citizens by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime. Then abolish that law without delay, for it is not only an evil itself, but it is also a fertile source for further evils because it invites reprisals. If such a law -- which may be an isolated case -- is not abolished immediately, it will spread, multiply, and develop into a whole system of plunder and interventionism, a system called socialism." --Frederic Bastiat, 1850

Classical liberalism (the political philosophy of John Locke, Adam Smith, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Herbert Spencer -- a few of the forerunners of the modern libertarian movement) favored individual rights of self and property, free markets, and limited constitutional government. Twentieth Century "liberals" (who are really welfare-state fascists) have stolen the term "liberal" and stand for the opposite of what classical liberalism stood for. Today's so-called "liberals" claim the right to use the power of Big Government to spend other peoples' money and run other peoples' lives --arrogantly thinking that they can run our lives for us and spend our earnings for us better than we can do so ourselves. Modern "Liberalism" is simply busybodyism with the power of the Big Gun -- the meddlesome political state -- behind it.

Unless check-mated by a vigilant citizenry, government tends to grow in size, power, and reach. And it acts more and more like the criminals it was supposed to protect its citizens from in the first place. Click to find out where this trend could lead. What are the degrees of busybodyism?

The more power we give to government to tax, regulate, and control us, the less freedom we have. And the more power is given to government, the more it wants and the more it usurps. Controls beget more controls. Regulations tend to create side effects which are then seized upon as excuses for still more regulations, and so on. Government meddling spreads until we wake up living in a country run by a government which has more in common with Nazi Germany or even Soviet Russia than it does with the original American Republic.