What Freedoms Are Americans Celebrating Today?
July 4, 2007 The Fourth of July celebrations will undoubtedly bring forth pronouncements that U.S. troops in Iraq are defending the freedoms expressed in the Declaration of Independence. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, most of the freedoms that Americans will be celebrating today are antithetical to the genuine principles of freedom enunciated in the Declaration. There is no better way to demonstrate this than by contrasting the freedoms that Americans in, say, 1880 were celebrating on the Fourth of July with those freedoms that Americans celebrate today. In 1880 America, there was no income taxation, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, welfare, public (i.e., government) schools, drug laws, gun control, immigration controls, foreign wars, or foreign aid. Economic regulations were few. That is what it once meant to be an American. That is what it once meant to be free. In the hearts and minds of our American ancestors, freedom included the natural or God-given right t
