By Jeffrey T. Donner, Esq.

June 1, 2026

I. Introduction: The Question That Sounds Absurd Until You Think About It

Are American citizens today actually more free than the medieval serfs depicted in Braveheart?

At first, the question sounds ridiculous.

Modern Americans can vote. They can travel. They can own property. They can sue and be sued. They can choose careers, change jobs, criticize the government, practice religion, start businesses, enter contracts, marry by consent, and leave their hometowns without asking permission from a lord.

A medieval serf could not do those things in any modern sense. A serf lived in a world of status, hierarchy, land dependency, military obligation, hereditary burden, and personal subordination. If the comparison is literal, the answer is easy: modern Americans are more free.

But that easy answer may also be too easy.

Because the real question is not whether a modern American has more formal legal rights than a 13th-century peasant. Of course he does.

The real question is whether modern American freedom still operates in any meaningful, practical, day-to-day way — or whether freedom has become a slogan wrapped around a vast machinery of taxation, licensing, regulation, surveillance, debt, insurance control, court costs, presuit barriers, procedural traps, criminal exposure, administrative discretion, and government-by-lawsuit.

The old feudal system was crude. You could see the lord. You could see the castle. You could see the tax collector, the soldier, the priest, the landlord, and the gallows.

Modern government is more sophisticated. It rarely appears as one man on horseback demanding obedience. It appears as forms, portals, licenses, compliance departments, administrative rules, statutes, regulations, mandatory disclosures, agency guidance, court procedures, local ordinances, professional certifications, e-filing rejection notices, insurance requirements, zoning codes, tax classifications, and enforcement letters.

The medieval serf knew he was not free.

The modern American is told constantly that he is.

That may be the most important difference.

II. The Serf Had a Lord. The Modern Citizen Has a System.

The medieval serf’s lack of freedom was personal and visible. He was tied to land. He owed labor or tribute. He lived under the authority of a lord. His rights were limited by status. His life was constrained by birth, custom, military violence, hunger, disease, and hierarchy.

The modern American is not tied to one lord’s land.

He can move from Florida to Texas. He can change jobs. He can criticize the president. He can form a corporation. He can sue a government official. He can buy a plane ticket. He can post angry political opinions on the internet. He can own a business, sell his house, homeschool his children, worship as he chooses, or refuse to worship at all.

That matters. It should not be minimized.

But the modern citizen’s constraints are not personal in the same way. They are systemic. Instead of one lord, he deals with thousands of authorities, public and private, formal and informal, legal and economic.

He needs a license to work in many occupations. He needs permits to build. He needs zoning approval to use land. He needs regulatory compliance to operate a business. He needs insurance for activities he cannot practically avoid. He pays income taxes, payroll taxes, property taxes, sales taxes, gas taxes, tourism taxes, impact fees, filing fees, recording fees, licensing fees, tolls, penalties, assessments, and hidden regulatory costs embedded in nearly every product and service he buys.

He is free to own property, but only within a dense network of land-use rules, building codes, environmental regulations, association covenants, mortgage documents, tax liens, code enforcement powers, and eminent-domain doctrines.

He is free to contract, but only subject to statutes, regulations, public-policy exceptions, mandatory disclosures, consumer-protection laws, employment laws, insurance regulations, banking rules, unconscionability doctrine, licensing regimes, and administrative enforcement.

He is free to go to court, but only if he can afford filing fees, service costs, lawyer fees, expert witnesses, presuit requirements, procedural rules, discovery burdens, case-management orders, and years of delay.

He is free to start a business, but only if he can navigate entity formation, tax registration, licensing, employment law, wage rules, insurance, local permits, advertising regulations, contract drafting, data privacy obligations, consumer claims, payment processing, banking requirements, and the possibility of being sued into the ground.

This is not feudalism.

But it is not simple freedom either.

It is administrative dependency.

III. The Modern American Is Not Ordered Around by a Lord. He Is Managed by Procedure.

The most important instrument of modern control is not the sword.

It is procedure.

Procedure sounds neutral. Sometimes it is neutral. Sometimes it is necessary. Courts need deadlines. Agencies need forms. Businesses need standards. Roads need rules. Buildings need codes. Banks need disclosures. Lawyers need filing requirements.

No serious person argues for chaos.

But procedure can become its own form of rule.

When a citizen cannot assert a right without first satisfying a long series of procedural conditions, the right becomes conditional. When a plaintiff cannot reach a jury without first obtaining expert corroboration he may need discovery to obtain, access to courts becomes theoretical. When a business cannot operate without administrative permission at every step, free enterprise becomes supervised enterprise. When a property owner cannot use his land without navigating overlapping layers of government approval, private property becomes provisional.

This is one of the great dishonesties in modern legal culture: the system preserves the vocabulary of liberty while surrounding liberty with conditions.

You have a right to court access — after presuit compliance.

You have a right to property — subject to regulation.

You have a right to contract — subject to statutory policy.

You have a right to run a business — subject to licensing.

You have a right to build — subject to permitting.

You have a right to speak — subject to platform rules, employment consequences, professional discipline, and government pressure campaigns that may never technically qualify as censorship.

You have a right to travel — subject to identification requirements, financial capacity, surveillance, airport security, police discretion, and border control.

You have a right to be left alone — unless some agency, prosecutor, plaintiff’s lawyer, regulator, clerk, lender, insurer, association, school board, licensing body, or compliance department has other ideas.

The result is not medieval serfdom.

It is something different: a society where the citizen is formally free but practically managed.

IV. The Administrative State Is the New Manor

The medieval manor organized life around land, labor, obligation, and hierarchy.

The modern administrative state organizes life around compliance.

That is the deeper comparison.

The modern citizen is not usually commanded by a person. He is governed by systems that no ordinary person fully understands and no single person fully controls.

The tax system is too complex for ordinary citizens to navigate confidently.

The criminal code is too broad for ordinary citizens to know what conduct might expose them to prosecution.

The regulatory state is too large for ordinary businesses to understand without professional help.

The healthcare system is too opaque for patients to understand pricing, billing, coding, coverage, networks, deductibles, denials, and collection exposure.

The court system is too procedurally dense for ordinary people to use effectively without lawyers.

The land-use system is too technical for many property owners to know what they may do with their own land.

The professional licensing system tells people they are free to work, but only after government grants permission.

The educational system tells parents they are free, but then entangles their children in bureaucratic structures that may be difficult to escape.

The banking and credit systems tell citizens they are free consumers, while debt, interest, credit scoring, and financial surveillance shape the practical boundaries of their choices.

Again, none of this is the same as being tied to a medieval lord.

But it raises the central question: if a citizen must constantly obtain permission, satisfy procedures, pay fees, manage compliance, avoid regulatory traps, and hire professionals to interpret the rules governing ordinary life, in what sense is he free in the older American meaning of the word?

The modern citizen may have no lord.

But he has a file.

V. The Legal Profession Has Helped Build the Cage

Lawyers should be the profession most alert to this problem.

Instead, lawyers have often helped build the machinery.

Modern law rewards procedural aggression, not wisdom. It rewards scale, leverage, volume, and specialization. It rewards lawyers who can weaponize statutes, stretch doctrines, multiply claims, generate pressure, and impose defense costs. It rewards government lawyers who can turn policy disagreements into enforcement actions. It rewards plaintiff’s lawyers who can find legal theories first and plaintiffs second. It rewards defense lawyers who can bury cases in procedural expense until the merits become almost irrelevant.

That is not the rule of law at its best.

That is law as machinery.

Public nuisance is a good example. Historically, public nuisance addressed interference with public rights: blocked roads, polluted waters, dangerous land uses, noxious conditions, and similar harms. But modern lawsuits increasingly try to convert public nuisance into a general-purpose regulatory theory. If a product, industry, platform, or business model allegedly causes social harm, the argument becomes: call it a nuisance and ask a court to impose relief.

That is not traditional adjudication. That is legislation by complaint.

The same problem appears when consumer-protection statutes become catch-all weapons for disputes that are not really about consumer deception. It appears when class actions are filed less because identified citizens independently sought redress and more because lawyers identified a profitable theory and then found plaintiffs to carry the caption. It appears when government enforcement actions pursue policy objectives through litigation rather than through legislation.

A lawsuit is supposed to resolve a dispute between parties.

It is not supposed to become an unelected regulatory program.

But modern litigation often blurs that line because the incentives reward it.

VI. Courts Are Supposed to Decide Cases, Not Govern Society

The judiciary is powerful because it is limited.

Courts decide cases. They do not run society. They do not issue advisory opinions. They do not enact broad policy because a legislature failed to act. They do not become regulatory agencies because a cause is important. They do not expand common-law doctrines into policy weapons because a defendant is unpopular.

At least, that is the theory.

But modern litigation constantly tempts courts to leave that role. A plaintiff identifies a broad social problem. The legislature has not solved it. Agencies have not solved it. The public is upset. The issue is framed as urgent. The defendant is portrayed as powerful or unsympathetic. The complaint is drafted not merely to obtain relief for a concrete injury, but to reshape behavior across an industry.

That is government by lawsuit.

It is especially dangerous because it preserves the appearance of law. There is a complaint. There is a judge. There are motions. There are briefs. There are hearings. There may even be settlements dressed up as consent decrees.

But the function is regulatory.

The court becomes the place where policy is made without the ordinary political accountability of legislation. The plaintiff’s lawyer becomes a private attorney general. The defendant becomes the object lesson. The actual plaintiff may become almost incidental — the ticket to the courthouse, not the true author of the dispute.

This is not how a constitutional system is supposed to work.

If a rule should apply generally, the legislature should enact it. If an agency has authority to regulate, the agency should act within authority delegated by law. If neither has authority, the answer is not to invent a lawsuit.

The importance of an issue does not expand judicial power.

Sometimes it should restrain it.

VII. The Ordinary Citizen Pays for the System

The people who benefit from excessive litigation often describe themselves as champions of ordinary people.

Sometimes they are. There are real injuries. Real misconduct. Real fraud. Real negligence. Real corporate abuse. Real government abuse. Real people who need lawyers because no one else will help them.

But the litigation system also produces costs that are spread across society.

Insurance premiums rise. Businesses price risk into goods and services. Doctors practice defensively. Landlords increase rent. Employers become more cautious. Products become more expensive. Small businesses avoid growth. Municipalities settle questionable claims to avoid defense costs. Public agencies spend taxpayer money managing lawsuits instead of performing core functions.

The public hears about the large verdict. It rarely sees the distributed cost.

A person who never files a frivolous lawsuit may still pay higher insurance premiums because other people do. A careful business may still pay more for liability coverage because the system rewards exaggerated claims. A good doctor may still pay higher malpractice premiums because medicine is practiced inside a litigation economy. A regular family may pay more for housing, services, healthcare, and consumer goods because legal risk has been embedded into everything.

This is how the modern system differs from feudal extraction.

The medieval serf saw the obligation. Labor was demanded. Crops were taken. Tribute was owed.

The modern citizen often never sees the extraction. It is hidden inside premiums, prices, taxes, fees, compliance costs, interest rates, litigation reserves, defensive practices, and bureaucratic delay.

The result may be less dramatic than a lord taking grain from a field.

But it is still a transfer of freedom.

VIII. The Certificate of Service and the Absurdity of Ritual

Sometimes the best example of a huge problem is a small one.

Consider the certificate of service.

In the older world of litigation, a certificate of service had a real function. A lawyer served a document by mail, hand delivery, facsimile, or email. The certificate told the court and parties how service was made, when it was made, and to whom it was sent. It often included a service list, which helped everyone identify the lawyers and parties in the case.

Then e-filing arrived.

Now, in many cases, the portal itself creates the electronic record of filing and service. The system already shows that the document was filed. The system already sends notice. The system already records the event.

Yet lawyers still attach certificates solemnly announcing that the document was filed through the e-filing portal.

No one needed to be told that. The portal says it. The docket says it. The email notice says it. The electronic filing stamp says it.

Meanwhile, the modern certificate often provides less useful information than the old one. It may not clearly list every lawyer in the case. It may not help a court reporter identify appearances. It may not help a new lawyer understand the service structure. It may simply recite the obvious because the ritual survived after the function disappeared.

This is a perfect miniature of modern law.

The useful old thing became a useless new ritual.

Then more rituals were added.

Certification of conferral. Certification of good-faith effort. Certification regarding page limits. Certification regarding AI. Certification that citations exist. Certification that the lawyer did what lawyers were already professionally obligated to do. Certification piled on certification until the filing begins to look less like advocacy and more like a compliance packet.

The system does not ask: what function does this serve?

It asks: what additional certification can we require?

That is how bureaucracy thinks.

IX. Clerk Review and the Blurring of Judicial Power

The same problem appears when clerks reject filings for reasons that drift beyond ministerial review.

Clerks have an important job. Dockets require order. Filing systems require standards. Case numbers, captions, fees, signatures, and basic formatting matter. Courts cannot operate if filings are chaos.

But clerks are not judges.

When filing review becomes substantive legal screening, the courthouse door is no longer controlled by judicial decision. It is controlled by administrative gatekeeping.

That distinction matters.

A court may strike a filing. A judge may deny relief. A judge may reject a proposed order. A judge may impose sanctions. A judge may require compliance with rules. But when a filing is refused at the threshold for reasons that effectively involve legal judgment, the citizen’s access to court has been burdened by administrative action before judicial review even begins.

This is not a minor inconvenience. It is part of a larger pattern.

The modern citizen is increasingly governed not only by law, but by systems that decide whether he may even present his legal position.

Forms become gates. Portals become gates. Clerks become gates. Presuit requirements become gates. Expert affidavits become gates. Local rules become gates. Standing orders become gates. Formatting requirements become gates. Certification requirements become gates.

At some point, “access to court” becomes a phrase people repeat while standing outside the courthouse trying to figure out which procedural key opens the door.

X. Medical-Malpractice Presuit and Conditional Access to Courts

Florida’s medical-malpractice presuit system illustrates the same problem in a more serious way.

The official explanation sounds reasonable. Medical-malpractice claims are serious. Doctors and hospitals should not face frivolous suits. Plaintiffs should investigate before filing. Experts should review the claims. Early exchange of information may promote settlement.

That is the theory.

In practice, presuit can function as a procedural barrier to court access.

An injured patient may need expert support before filing suit. But the patient may need discovery to obtain the facts necessary to secure expert support. Treating physicians may be reluctant to accuse another physician of malpractice. Retained experts are expensive. Medical records are technical. Causation may be complex. A patient with real pain, real injury, and real suspicion of negligence may have no practical way to get through the presuit gate.

So the courthouse is technically open.

But only after the claimant satisfies a condition he may not have the resources to satisfy.

That is not medieval serfdom. But it is conditional justice.

And conditional justice is not the same as access to courts.

A right that can be exercised only by people with enough money, enough institutional knowledge, enough expert access, and enough procedural sophistication is not a fully functioning right. It is a right filtered through bureaucracy.

That is the modern pattern.

The right exists.

The process consumes it.

XI. The New Certification Culture

The new citation-certification rules and AI-related filing requirements show the same bureaucratic instinct.

Of course lawyers should verify their citations. Of course cited cases should exist. Of course no lawyer should file fake authority. Of course lawyers should not blindly rely on generative AI, Westlaw, Lexis, Google Scholar, a law clerk, an associate, a paralegal, or anyone else.

But that was already true.

A lawyer’s signature on a filing was already supposed to mean professional responsibility. The lawyer already had duties of competence, candor, diligence, supervision, and honesty. Courts already had sanction powers. Bar discipline already existed. Motions to strike already existed. Fee-shifting already existed. Inherent authority already existed.

The filing of fake cases is not an AI problem in the deepest sense.

It is a lawyer-competence problem.

AI may generate a fake citation, but AI does not sign the motion. AI does not file through the portal. AI does not owe duties to the court. AI does not hold a law license.

The lawyer does.

When a system responds to lawyer incompetence by requiring every lawyer to include another formal certification, the system is not really solving the problem. It is spreading the administrative burden across the competent and incompetent alike.

Competent lawyers now have another ritual.

Incompetent lawyers remain incompetent.

Dishonest lawyers remain dishonest.

And the machinery expands.

XII. Freedom of Contract and Property Rights After the Footnotes

Americans are taught that freedom of contract and private property are central features of the constitutional order.

They are.

But not in the simple way public rhetoric suggests.

Freedom of contract exists within an enormous body of statutory, regulatory, administrative, and judicial limitations. Private property exists within zoning, taxation, eminent domain, environmental regulation, code enforcement, mortgage law, association covenants, permitting requirements, development restrictions, and land-use planning.

Some of those limits are legitimate. Some are necessary. Some prevent real harm. A serious critique of overgovernment does not require pretending all regulation is irrational.

But intellectual honesty requires admitting that the old civic language no longer describes the full reality.

An American homeowner does not own property in the way schoolchildren imagine ownership. He owns a bundle of rights subject to government taxation, regulation, permitting, liens, code enforcement, association rules, and market constraints.

An American business owner does not operate in a simple world of free exchange. He operates in a supervised world of tax rules, employment law, insurance requirements, licensing regimes, consumer statutes, safety rules, payment systems, contract doctrines, and litigation exposure.

An American worker is not personally bound to a lord. But he may be bound by debt, health insurance dependency, licensing requirements, noncompete disputes, credential inflation, housing costs, childcare costs, tax burdens, and fear of losing access to the systems necessary to survive.

Modern freedom is real.

But it is heavily mortgaged.

XIII. The Administrative State Is Not Just Federal

Many people hear “administrative state” and think only of federal agencies.

That is too narrow.

The administrative state is federal, state, county, municipal, judicial, educational, professional, financial, medical, and quasi-private.

It is the federal agency issuing rules. It is the state board controlling licenses. It is the county permitting office. It is the city code-enforcement officer. It is the school district policy. It is the professional disciplinary body. It is the court committee drafting another rule. It is the clerk’s office enforcing portal requirements. It is the insurer dictating practical choices. It is the association enforcing covenants. It is the hospital billing system. It is the bank compliance department. It is the employer’s HR policy written in fear of litigation. It is the platform content rule influenced by government pressure or litigation risk.

The citizen experiences these things together.

He does not care whether the source of control is technically federal, state, local, judicial, administrative, contractual, or quasi-private. He experiences it as the same thing: another authority telling him what he must do, what he must file, what he must pay, what he must certify, what he must disclose, what he must prove, what he must obtain, and what he must not say.

That is why the old categories are losing explanatory power.

A citizen may be formally free in constitutional theory and still practically entangled in a system of permissions.

XIV. The Braveheart Problem

That brings us back to Braveheart.

As history, the movie is unreliable. It compresses, invents, dramatizes, and mythologizes. It is not a documentary about medieval Scotland.

But as political emotion, it captures something enduring: people know the difference between living as free men and living under domination.

The mistake is to think domination always looks medieval.

Modern domination does not need a castle.

It can look like a portal.

It can look like a regulation.

It can look like a denial letter.

It can look like a filing rejection.

It can look like an agency notice.

It can look like a professional complaint.

It can look like a court rule.

It can look like a certification requirement.

It can look like a lawsuit brought in the name of public protection but functioning as policy enforcement.

It can look like a compliance department sending a polite email.

It can look like a government official saying, “No one is forcing you,” while every practical option has already been made impossible.

The modern world is cleaner, safer, richer, more comfortable, and more formally rights-protective than medieval life. That should be acknowledged.

But comfort is not the same as freedom.

A citizen can be entertained, medicated, insured, monitored, taxed, licensed, indebted, regulated, and procedurally managed while still being told he lives in the freest society in history.

Maybe he does.

But it is fair to ask: compared to what definition of freedom?

XV. Formal Freedom Versus Practical Freedom

The strongest answer is this: Americans have formal freedom, but less practical freedom than the national mythology admits.

Formal freedom means the Constitution recognizes rights. It means the government cannot openly reduce citizens to hereditary legal status. It means courts exist. Elections exist. Speech rights exist. Property rights exist. Due process exists. Religious liberty exists. Equal protection exists.

Those things matter.

Practical freedom means something else.

It means the ordinary citizen can actually live, work, build, speak, worship, own, travel, contract, raise children, seek medical care, start a business, defend himself, and resolve disputes without being constantly managed by systems he cannot understand and cannot afford to challenge.

That is where modern America has a serious problem.

The gap between formal freedom and practical freedom is growing.

A person may have a right on paper but no affordable way to enforce it. A business may have a legal defense but no money to litigate it. A patient may have a malpractice claim but no expert to support it. A homeowner may own land but no realistic ability to use it. A lawyer may have a filing but no way to avoid a clerk’s procedural rejection except by complying with requirements that may exceed ministerial review. A citizen may have speech rights but no institutional power to withstand retaliation, cancellation, licensing pressure, employment consequences, or government-adjacent coercion.

In that world, the Constitution remains real.

But it is not self-executing.

Freedom must be practically usable, or it becomes ceremonial.

XVI. The Supreme Court Has Started to Notice

Recent Supreme Court decisions reflect, at least in part, judicial recognition that the administrative state cannot be allowed to swallow constitutional structure.

When courts insist that agencies need clear congressional authorization for questions of vast economic and political significance, they are not merely deciding technical administrative-law disputes. They are asking whether major policy decisions should be made by accountable lawmakers or by agencies discovering old statutory language for new regulatory projects.

When courts reject automatic deference to agency interpretations of ambiguous statutes, they are not merely adjusting doctrine. They are restoring the principle that courts say what the law is.

When courts insist on jury-trial rights in certain enforcement actions seeking civil penalties, they are not merely inconveniencing agencies. They are recognizing that constitutional rights do not disappear because the government prefers administrative efficiency.

These cases do not abolish the administrative state. They do not solve the problem. They do not restore some imagined libertarian paradise.

But they identify the central issue: modern government constantly tries to convert constitutional questions into administrative questions.

Who decides?

Who has authority?

What process is required?

What rights remain?

What must Congress actually authorize?

What can agencies do on their own?

What belongs in court?

What belongs before a jury?

Those are not technicalities.

Those are the architecture of freedom.

XVII. Why This Matters to Lawyers

Lawyers should care about this more than anyone.

A society governed by too much bureaucracy eventually stops needing lawyers in the best sense and starts needing compliance technicians.

A real lawyer asks: Who has authority? What does the text say? What is the cause of action? What is the remedy? What is the burden of proof? What are the limits of the doctrine? What does the Constitution permit? What facts can be proved?

A compliance technician asks: Which box do I check?

The legal profession is drifting toward the second model.

That is why the multiplication of certifications matters. That is why presuit barriers matter. That is why e-filing rituals matter. That is why public nuisance expansion matters. That is why government-by-lawsuit matters. That is why clerk overreach matters. That is why administrative adjudication matters. That is why professional licensing matters. That is why regulatory sprawl matters.

These are not separate complaints.

They are symptoms of one condition: legal judgment being displaced by procedural administration.

The lawyer’s role should be to resist that displacement.

Not recklessly. Not theatrically. Not by pretending all government is illegitimate or all regulation is wrong.

But by insisting on first principles.

Courts decide cases.

Legislatures make laws.

Agencies act within delegated authority.

Clerks administer filings; judges decide legal issues.

Lawyers verify their work.

Common-law doctrines have limits.

Constitutional rights are not mere slogans.

Access to courts must be real, not theoretical.

Procedure exists to serve justice, not replace it.

XVIII. Are We Freer Than Serfs?

So, are Americans today freer than medieval serfs?

In formal legal terms, yes.

Obviously yes.

But that answer is incomplete.

A medieval serf’s unfreedom was obvious because it was personal, hereditary, and visible. The modern citizen’s loss of freedom is harder to see because it is impersonal, procedural, and dispersed across thousands of systems.

The serf had one lord.

The modern citizen has many masters and is told that none of them is really in charge.

The serf owed labor.

The modern citizen owes taxes, fees, premiums, interest, compliance, documentation, licensing, and procedural obedience.

The serf was bound to land.

The modern citizen may be bound to debt, employment dependency, insurance dependency, licensing requirements, housing costs, school districts, health networks, and regulatory systems.

The serf needed permission from a lord.

The modern citizen needs permission from agencies, boards, clerks, lenders, insurers, associations, platforms, employers, and courts.

The serf knew the name of the man who controlled him.

The modern citizen gets a notice from an automated system.

That does not make the modern American a serf.

But it should make us more careful with the word “free.”

XIX. Conclusion: Bureaucracy Is Not Freedom

The United States remains a free country in important ways. That should not be denied.

But a free country can become less free without abolishing elections, repealing the Bill of Rights, or placing citizens under hereditary lords.

It can become less free by making ordinary life conditional on permission.

It can become less free by turning rights into procedural puzzles.

It can become less free by pricing people out of court.

It can become less free by allowing agencies to govern through ambiguous delegations.

It can become less free by allowing lawsuits to become regulatory weapons.

It can become less free by letting clerks, committees, portals, certifications, and administrative rules control access to judges.

It can become less free by multiplying laws until no ordinary citizen can know what obedience requires.

It can become less free while still calling itself free.

That is the danger.

The point is not that modern Americans are literally medieval serfs. They are not.

The point is that freedom is not measured only by the absence of a castle.

Freedom is measured by whether a citizen can actually live, work, speak, own, build, contract, worship, raise a family, defend himself, and seek justice without being trapped in a web of permissions he cannot understand and cannot escape.

By that measure, the question is no longer absurd.

It may be one of the most important questions we can ask.