In a country that's politically free, the government, if there is one, serves only to protect people against the initiation of physical force. The land of the free means people can run their lives as they see fit, as long as they don't coerce others.   

Political freedom distinguished America from all other nations.  When we won our revolution, we didn't become a military dictatorship.  We didn't become a dictatorship of the "people."  We didn't become a dictatorship of the majority.  We didn't become a tyranny of the rich and the elitists.

We became a country where that most hated of all souls rules, the individual.  And what did this soul rule?  Himself.  For the first time in history, government mostly left people alone through recognition of their right to be free.

We're well aware that the country's freedom didn't cover as many people as its founding documents proclaimed.  The "certain inalienable rights" of the Declaration of Independence applied mostly to white adult males.  As Abigale Adams wrote to husband John on March 31, 1776, "the passion for Liberty cannot be equally strong in the breasts of those who have been accustomed to deprive their fellow Creatures of theirs."  [1]

Still, that passion existed.  Benjamin Rush, Thomas Paine, and Benjamin Franklin attacked slavery and the slave trade publicly, and in his original draft of the Declaration of Independence Thomas Jefferson blamed the king for "[the slave trade,] determining to keep open a market where MEN should be bought and sold." [2, Jefferson's emphasis]  In spite of its shortcomings, the United States was still the freest nation on earth during its early years, because it came closest to implementing the principle of inalienable rights.  

With rights holding such a position of reverence in our early society, they could never be repudiated outright; they would have to be redefined and ignored.  Statists, as they always have been, were more than up to the task.  In an article for the National Gazette on April 2, 1792, James Madison noted the young republic was under attack from "those who study, by arbitrary interpretations and insidious precedents, to pervert the limited government of the Union, into a government of unlimited discretion, contrary to the will and subversive of the authority of the people." [3]

Thus, the theft of liberty was done in stages, with the invaluable aid of the morality of altruism.  The inverse of individualism, altruism proclaims man has no right to exist for his own sake, but only in service to others.  Altruism damns self-interest and exults self-sacrifice.  Though most Americans never fully embraced altruism as an ideal, it has forever played a significant role in keeping us from fighting for our rights.  Altruism is a demagogue's morality, practiced by those they oppress.

But altruism by itself can only go so far.  Convincing people they should voluntarily subordinate themselves to others leaves open the possibility they could change their minds.  Add the power of government guns to the mix, which is sold to people as enforcing a duty to serve others, and that possibility is eliminated.  People give up their sovereignty for subservience, which brings them closer to their beliefs.  Under altruism, individual rights don't exist, and America becomes another People's Republic.

Government coercion and altruism gradually switched us from a country where people were left alone to one that dispensed privileges and special protections.  As inequities and abuses piled up from state meddling, government imposed fixes that bred more inequities and abuses, beefing up its power in the process.   The state was on its way to omnipotence.   

Every tyranny has a need for propaganda to keep the slaves rowing with minimal defiance.  How do you get Americans, with their history of rebellion against oppressive government, to wave their flags at every government pronouncement?  You force them into government schools.

Thomas Jefferson argued that people needed an education to guard against losing their freedom.  For this he thought public schooling was the answer.  "Education is here placed among the articles of public care," he proclaimed in 1806, during his second term as president. [4] Later, he wrote that the "object [of my education bill was] to bring into action that mass of talents which lies buried in poverty in every country for want of the means of development, and thus give activity to a mass of mind which in proportion to our population shall be the double or treble of what it is in most countries."  [5]  Through public schooling, Jefferson thought people "would be qualified to understand their rights, to maintain them, and to exercise with intelligence their parts in self-government." [6]

Unfortunately, Jefferson was naive on this point.  Government educators have been more philosophically consistent with Karl Marx, who also pushed for state education, than with Jefferson.

"Liberty" as taught in today's government schools poses no threat to state power.  It is detached from any notion of individual rights and sewn up with the supremacy of community, of a responsibility to serve others.  A student soaked in altruism produces a willing slave.  He becomes the ultimate state subject, eager to sacrifice and duped into believing he's free.

A truly free person will resist being coerced and is the Achilles' heel in politicians' glorious schemes.  But altruism neuters the will to fight back and thereby becomes demagogues' most valuable weapon.  They know their plans create havoc, and they can count on people to want government to "do something" to make things right.  As we're seeing with the creation of an American Gestapo though the Homeland Security Department, it eagerly obliges.

Is freedom for everyone?  Only if you repudiate the initiation of force in human relationships.  Only if you believe your life belongs to you and is not an object for others to cannibalize.  Only if you're willing to defend your life against aggression in all its masks, even if the aggressor sings "God Bless America" after one of its disasters.  

"To secure all the advantages of [liberty]," James Madison wrote, "every good citizen will be at once a sentinel over the rights of the people [and the authority of the government]."  [7]  It's a little late to act as sentinels, but it's never too late to fight.

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References

1.  Remember the Ladies, Abigale Adams to John Adams

2.  The Rough Draft of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson

3.  The Union: Who Are Its Real Friends? James Madison, National Gazette, April 2, 1792, 

4.  Thomas Jefferson on Publicly Supported Education 

5.  Ibid.

6.  Ibid.

7.  Government, James Madison, National Gazette, January 2, 1792