This is from a few years back, but I just came across it (via a link on Kim du Toit’s blog):
http://www.backwoodshome.com/articles/silveira66.html
“You could publish stuff like this, but it would change nothing.”
Rather long, and it takes a while to get going - the first 20% is just scene-setting, and it doesn’t get detailed until a third of the way in. But worth the read. Particularly when it gets to discussing bureaucrats’ incentives to create further job security (drug war in particular). It’s also just the first of a series of 8 articles - to get the whole thing you have to order a CD (which I haven’t done).
Personally, I think it makes a good case, but I also don’t see any way to change the inertia of the current system. Bush - and Ashcroft in particular - have pushed things farther in this direction than they had been, but there’s no real evidence it would have gone the other way with someone else in office. And it IS true that even mentioning the Constitution - the so-called supreme law of the land - in a courtroom will just land you in a heap of trouble.
There is a followup at
http://www.backwoodshome.com/articles2/silveira77.html
in which he makes the point that we put up with a lot more now than the original revolting colonists did, and don’t complain … why is an interesting question. I think it might be simply that overall standard of living is so much higher now, people just don’t care as long as their everyday comforts aren’t obviously interfered with too much.
I don’t know how crazy this will sound, but the one “solution” that I think is actually doable is to wait until space travel and living in space is practicable and common, and then go create custom societies in orbit or the asteroid belt. Total self-sufficiency, mining water ice and using solar power, your own portable nanobot factory to build any equipment you might need … that’s the required basis for true freedom I think.