Right-wing oligarchs convinced Americans to confuse their own freedom to denude Americans with the body politic’s freedom to enjoy life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
With the result that the former has accelerated at the expense of the latter.
David Bentley Hart in Commonweal:
“An enormous number of Americans have been persuaded to believe that they are freer in the abstract than, say, Germans or Danes precisely because they possess far fewer freedoms in the concrete. They are far more vulnerable to medical and financial crisis, far more likely to receive inadequate health coverage, far more prone to irreparable insolvency, far more unprotected against predatory creditors, far more subject to income inequality, and so forth, while effectively paying more in tax (when one figures in federal, state, local, and sales taxes, and then compounds those by all the expenditures that in this country, as almost nowhere else, their taxes do not cover).