Back when America was free…

America has become such an unfree country, with government at all levels micro-managing every aspect of our lives. But America once was a free country. One of the best books describing how America became a tyranny is “Crisis and Leviathan,” by Robert Higgs.

He described a “ratchet effect” whereby, when ever a crisis happens — a war, a depression, a natural disaster — government “temporarily” grows to “solve” the crisis. After the crisis passes, government then scales itself back; it actually becomes smaller — but not smaller than it was before the crisis happened.

So, over time, government bit by bit keeps growing.

Well, how were things when Americans were free? Higgs writes (paragraph breaks added):

There was a time, long ago, when the average American could go about his daily business hardly aware of the government — especially the federal government. As a farmer, merchant, or manufacturer, he could decide what, how, when, and where to produce and sell his goods, constrained by little more than market forces.

Just think: no farm subsidies, price supports, or acreage controls; no Federal Trade Commission; no antitrust laws; no Interstate Commerce Commission. As an employer, employee, consumer, investor, lender, borrower, student, or teacher, he could proceed largely according to his own lights. Just think: no National Labor Relations Board; no federal consumer “protection” laws; no Security and Exchange Commission; no Equal Employment Opportunity Commission; no Department of Health and Human Services. Lacking a central bank to issue national paper currency people commonly used gold coins to make purchases.

There were no general sales taxes, no Social Security taxes, no income taxes. Though governmental officials were as corrupt then as now — maybe more so — they had vastly less to be corrupt with. Private citizens spent about fifteen times more than all governments combined. Those days, alas, are long gone.

Alas and alack.