Never before in my memory have people been thumbing their noses at .gov 'edicts' to the extent that they are now. Not only that, but their ranks are swelling daily.

As usual, Clair Wolfe expresses the message of freedom's awakening in this great article..
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The world is becoming less free. In the Middle East and Africa, Islamist fanatics try to bring back the Dark Ages. Europe stagnates under new layers of regulation imposed by the EU. In the United States, a president who disdains the messy art of political deal-making increasingly seeks to rule by executive order and bureaucratic fiat.

Think tanks from every part of the political spectrum agree that freedom is falling nearly everywhere. They release annual reports charting alarming declines. Democracy-promoting (and government-funded) Freedom House notes that freedom of the press is at a 10-year worldwide low. On the economic front, the conservative Heritage Foundation reports that the global growth of freedom has "ground to a halt" since 2008 after growing healthily for the previous 12 years.

While many of the worst losses for every type of freedom have been in Africa and the Middle East (where they didn't have much to begin with), the U.S. is not immune.

When it comes to press freedom, Reporters Without Borders recently dropped the U.S. from 33rd place to 46th due to the Obama administration's crackdown on whistleblowers, its monitoring of reporters' phone and email activities, and its eagerness to revive a seldom-used WWI-era espionage act to intimidate those who reveal government wrongdoing.

In economic freedoms, the most the U.S. can now say is, "We're #12!" Our rankings on the Heritage reports have been steadily falling. In 2013 we were in the top 10 and rated as "Free." Now we are rated "Mostly Free" and sit between Estonia (#11) and Bahrain (#13) on the charts. Furthermore, we are the only country in the world to record a loss of economic freedom in each of the last seven years.

Could be worse, though. In another index published in the U.S. by the Cato Institute, the U.S. ranks 17th in economic freedom. Between 1980 and 2000, the U.S. consistently ranked third, behind only Hong Kong and Singapore. We've plunged while our two previous rivals have held their places.

Of course, few of us would want to take up residence in Estonia or Mauritius, let alone Bahrain or the highly authoritarian Singapore. Economic freedoms are only part of the picture....

Here's the link to the rest of another great Clair Wolf Article...

http://www.backwoodshome.com/articles2/wolfe149.html