{"id":20136,"date":"2024-06-25T11:18:35","date_gmt":"2024-06-25T15:18:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/?p=20136"},"modified":"2024-06-25T11:20:44","modified_gmt":"2024-06-25T15:20:44","slug":"merle-haggard-and-the-lost-free-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/2024\/06\/25\/merle-haggard-and-the-lost-free-life\/","title":{"rendered":"Merle Haggard and the Lost \u201cFree Life\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/h1>\n

Merle Haggard and the Lost \u201cFree Life\u201d<\/a><\/h1>\n

by James Bovard<\/p>\n

\u201cIs the best of the free life behind us now?\u201d Merle Haggard asked in a haunting 1982 country music hit song. Nine years earlier, Haggard had scoffed at potheads and draft dodgers in a White House performance of his song \u201cOkie from Muskogee\u201d for President Richard Nixon. But reflecting widespread loss of faith in the American dream in the 1970s,his \u201cfree life\u201d song lamented Nixon\u2019s lies, the Vietnam debacle, and the ravages of inflation.<\/p>\n

The issue of lost freedoms helped spur me 30 years ago to write a book titled Lost Rights<\/em> chronicling how \u201cAmericans\u2019 liberty is perishing beneath the constant growth of government power.\u201d When I recently updated the political damage report in a book titled Last Rights<\/em>, in hindsight, the late twentieth century seemed practically a golden era of freedom, federal, state, and local governments have unleashed themselves from the Constitution and commandeered vast swaths of Americans\u2019 lives. The worst regulatory abuses of the 1990s still exist and plenty of new bureaucratic depredations have been added to the lineup.<\/p>\n

In the 1990s, federal regulators censored beer bottles, prohibiting breweries from revealing the alcohol content on the label. That prohibition ended but federal censorship multiplied a hundredfold. On July 4, 2023, federal judge Terry Doughty condemned the Biden administration for potentially \u201cthe most massive attack against free speech in United States history,\u201d including \u201csuppressing millions of protected free speech postings by American citizens,\u201d as a federal appeals court ruled last September. The Supreme Court will issue a bellwether ruling on that case before July.<\/p>\n

\u201cI wish a buck was still silver\u201d was the first line of Haggard\u2019s song. The U.S. Congress declared in 1792 that silver and gold were the foundation of the nation\u2019s currency. From 1878 onwards, the U.S. government sold silver certificate with this declaration: \u201cThis certifies that there is on deposit in the Treasury of the United States of America One Dollar in Silver Payable to the Bearer on Demand.\u201d In 1967, Congress passed the Act to Authorize Adjustments in the Amount of Outstanding Silver Certificates, \u201cadjusting\u201d the certificates by nullifying all further silver redemptions. President Lyndon Johnson removed silver from the nation\u2019s coinage in the mid-1960s.<\/p>\n

In the decades after Haggard\u2019s song, inflation has totaled 225 percent. It has made it far more difficult for average Americans to keep their heads above water and ravaged the ability to plan for one\u2019s future. Inflation has also provided a pretext for endless government interventions, including President Joe Biden\u2019s latest caterwauling about \u201cshrinkflation\u201d (companies selling smaller-sized packages for the same price).<\/p>\n

During the mid-1990s, Republicans captured control of Congress and promised to put federal agencies back on the leash. But Republican resolve faded and the party rallied around George W. Bush\u2019s promise to bring \u201ccompassionate conservatism\u201d to Washington. The 9\/11 attacks obliterated any tattered remnants of constitutional fidelity in D.C. After the biggest intelligence failure since Pearl Harbor, the percentage of Americans who trusted the government quickly doubled. President Bush pledged to \u201crid the world of evil\u201d \u2014 especially the evil of limiting politicians\u2019 power. Attorney General John Ashcroft proclaimed in late 2001: \u201cThose who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty … only aid terrorists for they erode our national unity and … give ammunition to America\u2019s enemies.\u201d Critics were correct that the government was ravaging freedom, but we were still damned traitors.<\/p>\n

In the 1990s, police used ethnic and racial profiles to target suspected drug couriers. After the 9\/11 attacks, the Patriot Act treated every American like a terrorist suspect. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court secretly ruled in 2006 that all Americans\u2019 telephone records were \u201crelevant\u201d to terrorism investigations and thus could be poached. The National Security Agency entitled itself to snuff the privacy of anyone \u201csearching the Web for suspicious stuff.\u201d Heroic whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed that the NSA can tap almost any cellphone in the world, exploit computer games like Angry Birds to poach personal data, access anyone\u2019s email and web browsing history, remotely penetrate almost all computers, crack the vast majority of computer encryption, and use Facebook and Google apps to send malware to targeted individuals. A federal report admitted in 2023 that FBI warrantless searches had zapped the privacy of more than three million Americans, but Congress recently extended the FISA law with no reform.<\/p>\n

Singing in the early 1980s, Haggard likely could not have imagined how far politicians would go to forcibly disarm Americans. In a 1994 Supreme Court case, the Clinton administration portrayed gun owners as the legal equivalent of drug dealers, asserting that \u201cone would hardly be surprised to learn that owning a gun is not an innocent act.\u201d President Bill Clinton swayed Congress to temporarily ban the sale of so-called \u201cassault rifles\u201d \u2014 semi-automatic firearms with knick-knacks like bayonet lugs and grenade launchers. Nowadays, President Biden and many Democrats are championing outlawing all semi-automatic firearms, which could mean confiscating more than 40 million guns.<\/p>\n

In the 1990s, local bureaucrats sporadically cracked down on home schooling, preventing a smattering of parents from teaching their own kids. During the recent COVID epidemic, teacher unions spurred unjustified school lockdowns that victimized tens of millions of children. Teacher unions vilified any opponents of school shutdowns as racists and enemies of humanity. Vast learning losses resulted that continue to plague young lives.<\/p>\n

In the 1990s, controversies erupted when some schools gave free condoms to teenagers. Many parents fiercely opposed the giveaway programs because they feel that the schools thereby sanction teenage or preteen copulation. Schools prohibited any \u201copt-out from condoms\u201d option for parents. Nowadays, many of the nation\u2019s largest school systems encourage children to agonize over their own gender identity from kindergarten through high school. According to the Washington Examiner<\/em>, \u201cWest Hartford Public Schools in Connecticut has begun to introduce gender ideology in kindergarten as part of what it calls \u2018social justice lessons,\u2019\u201d including texts that reportedly \u201cteach 5- and 6-year-olds that their parents and doctor assigned them their sex and might have gotten it wrong.\u201d Ten million kids attend government schools that will assist children to change their gender without parents\u2019 knowledge or permission. The Montgomery County, Maryland, school system justifies keeping young kids\u2019 gender transitions secret in order to protect children from their own parents. Today\u2019s puberty blockers and \u201cgender-affirming\u201d double mastectomies are far more disruptive than prophylactic freebies.<\/p>\n

In the 1990s, civil liberties groups challenged laws requiring drug tests for new employees. In September 2021, President Biden decreed that 80+ million adults working for private companies must get COVID vaccine injections. After millions of Americans took the jab thanks to his edict, the Supreme Court struck down his order, but neither Biden nor his political appointees have any liability for that illicit command or the side effects of the vax, including the vast increase in myocarditis in young males.<\/p>\n

Decades ago, politicians would not have dared to padlock all the churches and synagogues in their domain. But extrapolations of wildly inaccurate COVID mortality forecasts sufficed to nullify the First Amendment\u2019s protection of freedom of religion. Nevada decreed that casinos could operate at half capacity with hundreds of gamblers at a time for example, but churches could not have more than 50 worshippers regardless of their size. When the Supreme Court refused to overturn that edict, Justice Neil Gorsuch dissented: \u201cThere is no world in which the Constitution permits Nevada to favor Caesars Palace over Calvary Chapel,\u201d the church that sought the injunction.<\/p>\n

Haggard lamented the decline of the work ethic, harkening back to a time \u201cwhen a man could still work and still would.\u201d But today, self-reliance is rapidly becoming an endangered species. Since the \u201cfree life\u201d song came out, the number of handout recipients has more than doubled, and the feds are now feeding more than 100 million Americans. Politicians have become shameless about using tax dollars to buy votes. In 2020, a Democratic U.S. Senate candidate won an election after distributing fliers \u201cWant a $2,000 Check? Vote Warnock.\u201d The political clout of handout recipients was again demonstrated in 2022 congressional elections, when President Biden mobilized young people by promising to forgive their federal student loans.<\/p>\n

In the 40+ years since Haggard\u2019s songs came out, far fewer Americans continue to cherish freedom. According to a recent poll, almost a third of young American adults support installing mandatory government surveillance cameras in private homes to \u201creduce domestic violence, abuse, and other illegal activity.\u201d When did government snoops become guardian angels? Fifty-five percent of American adults support government suppression of \u201cfalse information,\u201d even though only 20 percent trust the government. Relying on dishonest officials to eradicate \u201cfalse information\u201d is not the height of prudence. How can freedom survive if so many people cannot politically add two plus two? A September 2023 poll revealed that almost half of Democrats believed that free speech should be legal \u201conly under certain circumstances\u201d (perhaps excluding criticism of their party\u2019s elected officials). Support for censorship is stronger among young folks whose schooling perhaps smote their natural love of freedom.<\/p>\n

Subjugation is becoming the norm and freedom the exception. Would earlier generations of Americans have tolerated Transportation Security Administration agents pointlessly squeezing billions of butts and boobs while never catching a single terrorist? Would they have tolerated the FBI investigating traditional Catholics based on far-fetched fears about their religious beliefs? Would they have tolerated a president\u2019s reelection campaign trumpeting the notion that a vote for his opponent is a vote for Hitler?<\/p>\n

Haggard\u2019s 1982 song had a piercing refrain: \u201cAre we rolling down hill like a snowball headed for Hell?\u201d He tacked on an upbeat ending: \u201cThe best of the free life is still yet to come.\u201d But he lost hope and lamented before his death: \u201cIn 1960, when I came out of prison as an ex-convict, I had more freedom under parolee supervision than there\u2019s available to an average citizen in America right now…. God almighty, what have we done to each other?\u201d As Supreme Court Justice Gorsuch warned two years ago, \u201cWe live in a world in which everything has been criminalized.\u201d<\/p>\n

Since Haggard\u2019s passing in 2016, freedom is even more of an endangered species. The biggest sea change is the plummeting number of Americans who cherish their own liberty. Many of the protestors who vehemently denounce Donald Trump or Joe Biden are not opposed to dictators per se; they simply want different dictates. No wonder a 2022 nationwide poll found that six times as many Americans expected their rights and freedoms to decline in the next decade, compared to the number expecting an increase.<\/p>\n

How many Americans have lost the sound political instincts of their ancestors? Nowadays, politicians merely need to promise salvation to justify further decimating freedom. The submission to COVID lockdowns and other decrees epitomizes the failure of either (or both) realism and courage among much of the populace. Do Americans recognize that once a president escapes the confines of the Constitution, they will eventually find themselves shackled? Back in 1837, Sen. Daniel Webster warned that \u201cthe Constitution was made to guard the people against the dangers of good intentions. There are men in all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern. They promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters.\u201d<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, it is easier to document the loss of freedom than to rouse people to defend their own rights. Liberty is invaluable regardless of how many politicians seek to destroy it or how many fools fail to cherish it.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 [From\u00a0 the June 2024 issue of the Future of Freedom]<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Merle Haggard and the Lost \u201cFree Life\u201d by James Bovard \u201cIs the best of the free life behind us now?\u201d Merle Haggard asked in a haunting 1982 country music hit song. Nine years earlier, Haggard had scoffed at potheads and draft dodgers in a White House performance of his song \u201cOkie from Muskogee\u201d for President […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":19228,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2349,45,2535,245,2436],"class_list":["post-20136","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-covid","tag-freedom","tag-merle-haggard","tag-nixon","tag-silver"],"yoast_head":"\nMerle Haggard and the Lost \u201cFree Life\u201d - James Bovard<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Merle Haggard's song capture the loss of freedom in modern America\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/2024\/06\/25\/merle-haggard-and-the-lost-free-life\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Merle Haggard and the Lost \u201cFree Life\u201d - 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