by Jacob G. Hornberger

August 19, 2026

Benjamin Franklin pointed out a truth that should be highly discomforting to 21st-century Americans: “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”

Why discomforting? Because that’s exactly what both 20th-century and 21st-century Americans have done. They have traded away their liberty for a little temporary safety. Given that, Americans deserve neither liberty nor safety.

I would add a corollary to Franklin’s dictum: Those who trade away their liberty to their government in the hope of being kept safe will not even get the safety for which they traded. That’s because they won’t be safe living under the regime to which they traded away their liberty.

What motivated Americans to trade away their liberty for the hope of security? Fear. Americans are afraid of everything. To be kept safe from the things they are so afraid of, they traded their liberty away, which has not only left them unfree but also totally unsafe at the hands of their own tyrannical and oppressive government.

Take the welfare state, which is best represented by its crown jewels: Social Security and Medicare. Americans live in desperate fear that under a genuinely free society — that is, one in which people are free to keep everything they earn and decide for themselves what to do with their own money — people would be dying en masse from starvation and illness.

In other words, they were too afraid to entrust their lives and well-being to freedom, free markets, and voluntary charity. To relieve their fears, they traded away their freedom for a massive federal welfare-state “safety net.” In return, they got income taxation that takes a large portion of their income, a brutal and fearful IRS, constantly debased currency, an ever-soaring national debt, and a nation of child-adults who live in constant fear of losing the federal dole on which they have become hopelessly dependent.

Take the drug war. Americans are scared to death that the drug dealers are coming to get them and force them and their children to become drug users or drug addicts. To relieve their fear, they traded away their freedom for one of the most tyrannical and oppressive federal programs in U.S. history, one that has become a permanent part of American life.

Freedom entails the right to ingest whatever a person wants to ingest. With the drug war, Americans traded away their freedoms in the hope of being kept safe from drug dealers. But here’s the funny part: They didn’t get the safety that they thought they would get. That’s because they now live under a regime that wields the power to assassinate them, seize their money and not charge them with a crime, bash down their doors in the middle of the night, send them to prison for years or decades, destroy their privacy, and much more.

Take the war on illegal immigration. Americans are scared to death that in a genuinely free society — that is, one where people are free to cross borders — the foreign murderers, rapists, robbers, and the like will come to get them and do bad things to them. Or they are deathly afraid that with open borders, the “whole world” would come to America.

I live in Virginia, where we have open borders with all the other states of the United States. Every day, everyone in the United States could suddenly come to Virginia, including murderers, rapists, and robbers. Am I afraid of open borders here within the United States? Of course not. It’s a ridiculous, irrational fear, just as ridiculous as the fear of open international borders.

But even if I were afraid, I still wouldn’t call for border controls and a border police state between Virginia and the rest of the nation. That’s because freedom matters more to me than “security.” Unlike so many of my fellow Americans, I’m not willing to trade away liberty even if it would give me some temporary safety.

What have Americans gotten in exchange for giving up their liberty out of fear of foreigners? They’ve gotten one of the most brutal and tyrannical systems in U.S. history, including warrantless searches of people’s farms and ranches within 100 miles of the border; the criminalization of hiring, transporting, or caring for illegal immigrants; fixed highway checkpoints involving warrantless searches; roving Border Patrol checkpoints; a Berlin Wall; violent kidnappings; separation of children from parents; the destruction of harmony among people; the denigration of God’s second-greatest commandment; the destruction of economic liberty, freedom of contract, freedom of association, and the freedom to publicly protest; and a deadly and destructive police state that is now expanding from the borderlands to the entire nation.

Take Cuba, Iran, Venezuela, Afghanistan, Iraq, Russia, China, North Korea, Nicaragua, and other “rivals,” “adversaries,” “opponents,” or “competitors” of the U.S. Empire. Americans are deathly afraid of them all. They are convinced that the Reds, the terrorists, the Muslims, the WMDers, and the foreign tinpot tyrants are coming to get them. And so they have traded away their liberty for a tyrannical, oppressive, imperialist, and militarist national-security state governmental structure that wields the omnipotent powers of invasion, occupations, wars of aggression, sanctions, embargoes, blockades, assassination, torture, indefinite detention, coups, regime-change operations, a militarized society, an empire of foreign and domestic military bases, massive secret surveillance, and more.

Modern-day Americans traded away their freedom in the hope of obtaining a little temporary safety. Yet, Americans didn’t get the safety they were hoping to get. As Benjamin Franklin pointed out, in making that trade, Americans deserve neither liberty nor safety.