Dead Men’s Voices comments on the reasons people trade away their liberty:
I have often wondered why the modern man is so quick to sacrifice his liberties to various luxuries, pleasures, fears, and mindless causes. I have wondered how a nation founded upon the principles of liberty and self-government through the pain and blood of its fathers could devolve to a welfare state and adopt as its guiding principle the most messianic, blatant statism. The courage of our fathers produced a powerful and resolute feeling of self-reliance firmly entrenched in the context of family, religion, and a decent society. Men who knew first hand the hypocrisy, uselessness, oppression, and pain of tyrannical rule were quite well aware that the messianic claims of the state were empty, daggers for the soul and chains for the mind. At what point did we begin to believe that the state should educate our children, care for our aging parents, direct our charitable efforts, make the lame walk, and, in short, cure our every ill and woe?
Read the rest for his answer.