Writes Jacob Hornberger about the 4th of July: " the 'freedom' that Americans today celebrate is opposite to the freedom that our American ancestors celebrated when they celebrated Independence Day every year. The reason I put the word in quotations is because I personally don’t consider it to be genuine freedom, but the fact is that most Americans today do.
Today, Americans define freedom as the extent to which the government is taking care of them, providing for them, and keeping them safe and secure from the likes of drug lords, terrorists, illegal aliens, and communists.
Consider the welfare state: Government provides people with retirement (Social Security), health care (Medicare and Medicaid), education (public schooling and education grants), farm subsidies, community grants, and many other programs that entail the government’s use of force to take money from whom it belongs in order to give it to people to whom it does not belong.
Consider the warfare state: 700-1000 military bases in some 130 countries, invasions, wars of aggression, undeclared wars, bombings, occupations, sanctions, embargoes, kidnapping, rendition, assassination, kangaroo tribunals, and the like. In a word, empire.
Consider the drug war, whereby the government wields the power to incarcerate people for ingesting non-approved substances, a 4-decade war that continues to wreak death, destruction, and corruption.
Consider the regulated society, in which governments at all levels regulate the most minute aspects of people’s lives, especially within the context of the so-called war on terrorism.
Consider the Federal Reserve and paper money, which involve a never-ending inflationary debasement of the value of people’s money in order to finance ever-burgeoning welfare-warfare state spending and debt.
Consider the income tax and the IRS, which suck money out of the pockets of those who have earned it in order to give it to those who haven’t earned it.
All this is considered 'freedom' by modern-day Americans."
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