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America is no longer the land of the free. We are still free in the sense that Norwegians, Germans and Italians are free. But that’s not what Americans used to mean by freedom.

It was our boast that in America, unlike in any other country, you could live your life as you saw fit as long as you accorded the same liberty to everyone else. The “sum of good government,” as Thomas Jefferson put it in his first inaugural address, was one “which shall restrain men from injuring one another” and “shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement.” Americans were to live under a presumption of freedom.

The federal government remained remarkably true to that ideal—for white male Americans, at any rate—for the first 150 years of our history. Then, with FDR’s New Deal and the rise of the modern regulatory state, our founding principle was subordinated to other priorities and agendas. What made America unique first blurred, then faded, and today is almost gone.

We now live under a presumption of constraint. Put aside all the ways in which city and state governments require us to march to their drummers and consider just the federal government. The number of federal crimes you could commit as of 2007 (the last year they were tallied) was about 4,450, a 50% increase since just 1980. A comparative handful of those crimes are “malum in se”—bad in themselves. The rest are “malum prohibitum”—crimes because the government disapproves.

More...http://www.wsj.com/articles/regulation-run-amokand-how-to-fight-back-1431099256 (http://www.wsj.com/articles/regulation-run-amokand-how-to-fight-back-1431099256)

^ Maybe there is over regulation now. But the government in the first 150 years wasn't as good as he claims. Not just for women, slaves, indians, etc. But even white males weren't much better if they didn't have land. And it's easy to claim those ideals when you have slaves doing all the work.

Easier to control people if they think there free.

Rudimentary psychology: (1) threaten to do harm, (2) threaten to do less harm, and (3) profit (http://www.history.com/news/stockholm-syndrome).

Read the bill of rights, look it up and just read it, the people who wrote that knew  what it was like to be screwed over and tried to set the future up so it could not happen again.  Sadly i agree with the op. I think it has

Its all been a gradual change something wouldn't cause a out right rebellion but maybe some discontent until people don't realize what has happened.