Control mobility – free movement – and you have controlled the population. Their other rights are automatically cheapened into functional irrelevance if the right to come and go without permission and free from interference is denied.
And so it has been.
It took a couple of generations, but most Americans seem to implicitly accept the idea that travel – even on foot – is a conditional privilege conferred (and legitimately regulated) by “the government.” Which of course is just an evasive euphemism for the busybodies and control freaks who have somehow acquired a legal monopoly on the use of force – and who use its threat (and actuality) to enforce their busybody/control freak ideas.
Amazon.com Gift Card i... Buy New $25.00 (as of 07:45 UTC - Details) One of these ideas is that movement beyond the threshold of your driveway – or the door to your apartment – is a kind of implicit permission-seeking from these control freaks and busybodies – who by dint of getting us to accept that we need their permission to move beyond the threshold of our driveways and doors explicitly assert their ownership of everything beyond the threshold of our driveways and door.
Including, of course, us.
We are their livestock – animals to be ear-tagged and corralled, our movements strictly supervised. Not free men.
Our rights a laughingstock . . .
Which of course, they are. Can you think of any which remain inviolate? Which have not also transitioned – somehow – into conditional privileges? We are now obliged to get a permission slip to do almost everything we used to be free to just do – including travel.
We need permission to practice our trade, to carry the means of self-defense, to transact business – even to speak our minds. All of them restricted by dint of requiring the by-your-leave of the busybodies and control freaks who constitute “the government.”
We didn’t used to have to beg permission to exercise what were once the acknowledged rights of free men.