By Jacob G. Hornberger
The Future of Freedom Foundation
October 9, 2026
Modern-day Americans have engaged in what might be called "liberty suicide," an act by which they have willingly killed their own freedom through their support of various liberty-destroying governmental programs.
The biggest example of this liberty suicide was the conversion of the federal government from a limited-government republic to a national-security state.
A limited-government republic involved a federal government whose powers were limited to those enumerated in the Constitution and whose powers were expressly restricted by the Bill of Rights. Given the fierce opposition by the Framers and our American ancestors to big, powerful, permanent military establishments, the size of the U.S. military was relatively small.
These characteristics, which lasted for more than 100 years, helped ensure a free society (except, of course, for slavery). Freedom was the goal of the Framers and our American ancestors when they used the Constitution to call the limited-powers federal government into existence.
That changed after World War II. The generations of Americans living in the late 1940s and early 1950s were induced into adopting a national-security-state form of governmental structure, which gave America a federal government with omnipotent powers, including the power of assassination.
There is no way that anyone can be considered free when he is living under a regime that wields omnipotent powers. Twentieth-century Americans gave up the freedom that comes with living in a limited-government republic to gain the "security" that comes with omnipotent government.
Why did Americans commit liberty suicide in this way ? They were induced into believing that the Reds, specifically in the Soviet Union and Red China, were coming to get them. After World War II, Americans were inculcated with a fearful mindset that held that an international communist conspiracy, which was supposedly based in Moscow, was determined to conquer the U.S. and the rest of the world. If the U.S. was not converted to a national-security state, Americans were told, America would end up falling to the Reds.
Thus, the communists and communism became the big official enemy of the United States. Americans bought into the notion that the U.S. national-security establishment - i.e., the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA - would keep them safe from the Reds.
It was all a great big racket, one that ensured that the national-security establishment would remain a permanent part of American life. Later, when this Cold War racket suddenly and surprisingly came to an end, the national-security establishment easily and successfully induced Americans to simply substitute the Reds and communism with Muslims and Islam as well as with the "terrorists," the "drug dealers," and the "illegals." In the process, the deep fear of the Reds that had been inculcated in Americans during the Cold War was successfully transferred to these new official enemies.
The racket, unfortunately, also came with a change in foreign policy that had begun with the Spanish-American War in 1898 - from one based on non-interventionism to one involving a never-ending series of invasions, wars of aggression, undeclared wars, coups, alliances with dictatorial regimes, sanctions, embargoes, and blockade - all of which gave Americans perpetual war with the aim of achieving perpetual safety and security from all the official enemies, including the ones that this interventionist foreign policy was producing.
The adoption of a welfare state was another way that Americans committed liberty suicide. As our American ancestors understood, freedom entails having the right to keep everything one earns and to decide for himself what to do with it. When people are forced to care for others, that's not a free society. Thus, it's no surprise that our American ancestors lived without income taxation, the IRS, Social Security, Medicare, welfare, farm subsidies, education grants, and corporate bailouts for more than 100 years.
Not so with 20th-century Americans. They became terribly afraid that with freedom, people might fall through the cracks, suffering severe impoverishment or even death. Freedom could not be trusted. In their minds, there needed to be a government safety net. That's why they adopted a government welfare state, which was funded by the federal income tax that was adopted in 1913. They were willing to kill their own liberty for the sake of welfare-state "security."
The waging of the war on drugs is another example of liberty suicide. The drug war has imposed an enormous police state on the American people, one involving punishing people for simply ingesting substances that officials consider harmful, dangerous, or destructive. But a free society entails the right to do precisely that.
Americans decided that eradicating illicit drug use was more important than freedom. Along with the destruction of the broad freedom to possess, ingest, and distribute drugs that characterized much of America's first century came the massive police-state destruction of civil liberties and privacy, such as with civil-asset forfeiture, anti-laundering statutes, no-knock raids, racist enforcement, mass incarceration, bank anti-secrecy laws, and much more.
Interestingly, but not surprisingly, the national-security state is now using its omnipotent power of assassination to wage the drug war. Such drug-war assassinations come with the full support of many modern-day Americans, who are more concerned with being kept "safe" from illegal drug dealers than they are with being free. Ironically, it is the government's own drug laws that give rise to the black-market drug dealers and the violence that comes with them, which, of course, makes the drug war a perfect racket for the destruction of a free society.
Liberty suicide also involved the rejection of America's original general policy of open immigration in support of a massive immigration-control system that is based on the socialist principle of central planning and that comes with an ever-growing deadly and destructive immigration police state that ultimately has expanded beyond the borderlands to encompass the entire nation. Once again, U.S. officials convinced Americans that the "illegals" or foreigners posed as great a threat, if not greater, to their safety and well-being as the Reds, the Muslims, the terrorists, and the drug dealers.
Unlike the Americans who founded our nation, what has mattered to modern-day Americans is "safety" and "security," not freedom. That's why modern-day Americans chose to commit liberty suicide. Ironically, though, U.S. officials have convinced many of them that they still are free, notwithstanding the reality that they aren't. In fact, I can't help but wonder whether the despair and depression that can come from living in an unfree society while denying the reality of one's lack of freedom might even contribute to some actual suicides, including among young people.
The good news about liberty suicide is that, unlike actual suicide, it is reversible. When a critical mass of Americans come to the realization that they aren't truly free and decide that they want to be free, they can restore the liberty that modern-day Americans have killed.
This article was originally published at The Future of Freedom Foundation.