It’s one of the last lines of the Star Spangled Banner; “The land of the free.” That’s how we think of ourselves as Americans. But there might not be as much freedom as we think.
Consider this; we can't build without a permit. We need licenses. And, as political historian Terry Madonna says, this even extends to our travel, if we want to go out of the country for vacation.
“If you owe money to the IRS then they are going to limit your ability to travel overseas,” Madonna told KTRH News.
So, are we really the country that our forefathers envisioned when we claimed our independence all those years ago? Madonna says the answer is obviously no, and explains when the balance started to shift.
“The 1930’s under FDR and the New Deal was the greatest expansion of the role of federal government, particularly into the economy,” Madonna explained.
And since then, Congress has passed even more laws that affected what we could do at the individual level.