Sustainable Freedom

Claire Wolfe at Backwoods Home outlines the reasons for disappearing freedom, and questions it's reversability:

So will freedom invariably implode? Does it always carry within it the seeds of its own destruction? Do human flaws doom us to return again and again to tyranny?

It's been so up to now. It's certainly so in America, where tattered scraps of paper meant to keep us free have become toilet paper for creatures whose mediocrity is equaled only by their ambition. Free men of character -- what few there are left -- separate themselves from the Roman orgy of spending, borrowing, controling, and killing that replaces paper-limited government. If a horse was elected to the Senate, they wouldn't be surprised. They might even consider it an improvement.

In a world of corrupt and institutionalized alphas peddling stolen goods, free men withdraw from civic life. They build computers and space rockets. They retreat to hidden backwoods gulches. They become expatriates. They defend themselves without permits. They school their own children. They deceive the tax man. They do what free men must to survive in a society that has no use for them. And they hope for a freedom that might return someday.

Nicely written article. The reasons she gives are all attributable to human tendencies--the very tendencies that need to be resisted and quelled at every turn, but mostly aren't, except for those few with the intelligence and knowledge to recognize and resist them.