Americans today are less free to live their lives as they want than they were in, say, 1950. And the Americans of 1950 were less free to live their lives as they wanted than were Americans living at the time of the Founding. Mandates, regulations, prohibitions, and taxes at all levels of government tie us down like Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver.

In a sharp essay for AIER, “Psychology, Security, and the Subtle Surrender of Freedom,” Mani Basharzad offers an excellent analysis of this regrettable erosion of individual freedom.

He writes:

Tocqueville’s special contribution lies in showing us the psychology of freedom. For him, liberty was not only a matter of institutions and individual rights, but also of the deeper attitudes that hold everything together and make freedom work. On this basis we arrive at one of the most disturbing parts of Tocqueville’s thought: freedom can be lost in democracies through democratic means. It is not only overthrown by revolutions, coups, or violent movements; it can disappear in a calm, civil, and apparently legitimate way.

Indeed so. Politicians smoothly say to voters, “Just let us have some of your liberty and some of your money and we will give you safety.” But once a nation starts doing that, the risk is that there’s no stopping point. The Founders understood that and therefore sought to prevent government from encroaching on individual rights.

As Basharzad writes, citizens who forget how to cooperate with each other “grow weaker, more dependent, and less capable. This is not the result of brute force, but of their own choice to substitute state power for individual autonomy, community, and responsibility. They give up their freedom and allow others to choose for them, lulled by the illusion that life will be easier.”

It’s what Hayek called the road to serfdom.