The US likes to project the image of being the land of the free. But as a matter of fact, few countries exert as tight a control over their citizens as does the US.
Few countries in the world regulate as strictly as the US what their citizens do to their own bodies. And in few countries is it as easy to become unintentionally entangled in criminal justice proceedings. And this is the case because no other country has such a large and detailed body of laws and regulations.
Freedom is the opposite of this. As Thomas Hobbes famously noted: “Liberty dependeth on the silence of the law.”
Many people don’t know that the US has the most criminal statutes of any country because they are not contained in a single penal code one could buy at a bookstore.
Instead, there are thousands of regulations with criminal implications spread across topics where one might not initially suspect them.
For example, in the US, certain deeds may not be outlawed in and of themselves, but it may be outlawed to use interstate highways for them, or the US Postal Service, or US airways, or the Internet, which the US treats as an internal network because US citizens can access information on it, even when the server is in Serbia and the language used is Swahili.
And through the back door, US lawmakers impose severe punishments on deeds that in themselves are not outlawed, simply because interstate highways, the US Postal Service, US airways, or the Internet are used.
This is clever maneuvering. In accordance with common legal sense, if a certain deed is not illegal in itself, the use of an interstate highway, the US Postal Service, US airways, or the Internet in conducting it should only be considered a minor offense.
If US legislators are of the opinion that a certain behavior ought to be outlawed, then they should pass such a law. But if they do not have the authority to outlaw a behavior in itself because of constitutional limitations, and if they only have the authority to regulate the means commonly used in conducting a certain behavior, then they should only be allowed to impose fines for what, by definition, can only be a breach of formalities.
The US legal system is out of proportion because lawmakers can always bypass the intent of the Constitution by imposing enormous prison terms based on the manner in which deeds are conducted, even when the deeds themselves are not illegal.
The US is a free country in one aspect: Everyone is free to establish a religion, no matter how idiotic its creed.
Apart from that, many of the liberties people are said to enjoy are not genuine. These liberties are eroded at the fringes, and if nothing else can be used for curtailing them, then there are always the tax laws.
(1891-1980)
In most US states, the age of consent to engage in a sexual relationship is 18 years old. In many European countries, the age of consent is 16. However, US law prohibits US citizens from having sexual relationships abroad with anyone under the age of 18, and a US citizen who has a sexual relationship with a 17-year-old in France or Germany may face a lengthy prison term upon returning to the US, even if in their home state, the age of sexual consent is also 17.
It’s the Iranian model for extraterritorial jurisdiction: Under Iranian law, a person born an Iranian Muslim cannot escape Iranian citizenship or Iranian law that prohibits a change of religion by settling in, for example, the US and becoming a Christian there.
But conventional wisdom is that Iran probably would not prosecute ex-Iranians who have become US citizens and converted to Christianity, simply because Iranian law enforcement does not have the necessary reach.
On the other hand, a former US citizen who has violated, or violates, US extraterritorial laws on sexual conduct with a person under 18 can by no means be certain that the US will not use all the muscle it has to force them to stand trial on American soil.
And to be free from US prosecution, everyone has to be careful about what they use the Internet for. If two men who have never been to the US use the Internet to discuss something that is not illegal in the countries where they are located or that issued their passports, they are not safe from being dragged before a US court, as they could still be charged with “using the Internet to conspire to” do something that the US deems contrary to its interests.
The US has a track record of this kind of trickery, and the rest of the world will only be safe from US interference when the US is no longer powerful enough to interfere. This explains the affinity felt by many different camps and people around the world who all have different ideologies and agendas but are united in just one aspect: they resent US meddling in their affairs.