Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the Government's purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal well meaning but without understanding. -- Louis D. Brandeis
Well meaning authorities continue to chip away at the ability of the individual to exercise freedom of choice. Whether it be the ability to ingest substances of our choosing into our own bodies (prohibition) - highlighted in the 1st article below, the ability to read or write about points of view that may offend certain sectors of society (censorship), or even the ability to make an independent decision about whether we wish to participate in a public program on healthcare (mandating), the remaining vestiges of our once-cherished freedom of choice are stripped away, layer by layer, until the day arrives when we are completely at the mercy of the nanny state.
The piece that follows looks at the embracing of a phenomenon called Statism which emerges out of economic, and/or security concerns. Here now is a brief excerpt: [There is always some great excuse for the trashing of the human freedom that built civilization as we know it. If the state cannot find one it is glad to invent one. A population that is ideologically gullible or afraid for its security can permit government to run roughshod over people's rights and liberties, and a government that gains such power never gives it back on its own].
A statist system—whether of a communist, fascist, Nazi, socialist or “welfare” type—is based on the . . . government’s unlimited power, which means: on the rule of brute force. The differences among statist systems are only a matter of time and degree; the principle is the same. Under statism, the government is not a policeman, but a legalized criminal that holds the power to use physical force in any manner and for any purpose it pleases against legally disarmed, defenseless victims. -- Ayn Rand
Tuesday, May 17, 2011 – by Dr. Ron Paul
Dr. Ron Paul
On April 20th, after a year-long undercover sting operation, armed federal agents acting on behalf of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) raided the business of Pennsylvanian Amish farmer Dan Allgyer to prevent him from selling his unpasteurized milk to willing, fully-informed customers in Maryland. Federal agents wasted a whole year and who knows how many of our tax dollars posing as customers in order to catch Allgyer committing the "crime" of selling his milk. He was not tricking people into buying it, he was not forcing people to purchase it, and there had been no complaints about his product. These were completely voluntary transactions, but ones that our nanny-state federal government did not approve of, and so they shut down his business. The arrogance of theFDA and so many other federal agencies is simply appalling. These types of police state raids on peaceful businessmen, so reminiscent of our tyrannical federal drug war, have no place in a free society.
The FDA claims its regulatory powers over food safety give it the authority to ban the interstate sales of raw milk, but this is an unconstitutional misapplication of the commerce clause for legislative ends. As we have seen, if the executive branch feels hamstrung by the fact that our framers placed lawmaking authority in the Legislative Branch, they simply make their own laws and call them "regulations."
Read More 
The Political Doctrine of Statism
Friday, May 27, 2011 – by Lew Rockwell
Lew Rockwell
The Patriot Act that was rammed through after the September 2001 attacks was one of the more egregious blows against liberty in our lifetimes. It shredded core rights and liberties that had been taken for granted for centuries. Liberties are never lost all at once, but the Patriot Act, as disgusting in its details as in its name and the rhetoric that surrounded it, was for the United States the turning point, the law that best exemplifies a full-scale embrace of statism as a national ideology. It is a law so severe, so outlandish, as to cause people to forget what it means to be free.
This is why I believe Ron Paul's book Liberty Defined to be one of the most important statements of our time. He defines liberty clearly and cleanly as freedom from coercive interference from the state. That is how the liberal tradition from Aquinas to Jefferson toRothbard understood it, too, for there is no greater threat to liberty than the state. Its powers must be crushed if we are to revisit what liberty means.
This is why I believe Ron Paul's book Liberty Defined to be one of the most important statements of our time. He defines liberty clearly and cleanly as freedom from coercive interference from the state. That is how the liberal tradition from Aquinas to Jefferson toRothbard understood it, too, for there is no greater threat to liberty than the state. Its powers must be crushed if we are to revisit what liberty means.
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