Compare and Contrast

I think the following quotes are a useful summary of the freedoms won and lost by the American people in the course of our history. From an article in Reason magazine by David Boaz, called Up From Slavery: "Brink Lindsey talks of an "implicit libertarian synthesis" in American politics today in his book The Age of Abundance. He argued in 2007: Nevertheless, the fact is that American society today is considerably more libertarian than it was a generation or two ago. Compare conditions now to how they were at the outset of the 1960s. Official governmental discrimination against blacks no longer exists. Censorship has beaten a wholesale retreat. The rights of the accused enjoy much better protection. Abortion, birth control, interracial marriage, and gay sex are legal. Divorce laws have been liberalized and rape laws strengthened. Pervasive price and entry controls in the transportation, energy, communications, and financial sectors are gone. Top income tax rates have been slashed. The pretensions of macroeconomic fine-tuning have been abandoned. Barriers to international trade are much lower. Unionization of the private sector work force has collapsed. Of course there are obvious counterexamples, but on the whole it seems clear that cultural expression, personal lifestyle choices, entrepreneurship, and the play of market forces all now enjoy much wider freedom of maneuver." Juxtapose the above to this perspective, which has, to my sense, considerable merit: "Jacob Hornberger of the Future of Freedom Foundation writes about the decline of freedom in America: First of all, let’s talk about the economic system that existed in the United States from the inception of the nation to the latter part of the 19th century. The principles are simple to enumerate: No income taxation (except during the Civil War), Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, welfare, economic regulations, licensure laws, drug laws, immigration controls, or coercive transfer programs, such as farm subsidies and education grants.There was no federal department of labor, agriculture, commerce, education, energy, health and human services, or homeland security."  It seems that we transitioned from positive governmental and societal discrimination against large segments of our society to constraining the freedoms of all by means of taxes and regulations--using as an excuse for these universal constraints the past injustices imposed upon the repressed groups. Of course, the disconnect in this line of implicit reasoning is that these modern constraints were not necessary to achieve the equality of opportunity previously lacking. They're just an excuse for socialism and elitist overreach.