When I read the answers to this sort of question I can't help but rephrase it as, "Do white fairly well off men feel we are still the best nation in terms of individual freedom?"
Blacks, and women would say the good old days were not so good.
People living in the territories may have had more personal freedom but also little if any say in national issues.
Many cowtowns had severe firearm restrictions.
Big companies ran roughshod over the legal but immigrant citizens. Big City politics was as rigged as a carnie 3 card monty game.
Corporations may bemoan the EPA but I like clean water and no acid rain.
I certainly don't like the so-called Patriot Act, but our history is littered with Alien and Sedition Acts along with suspending basic rights.
I find the travel restriction to Cuba asinine.
So I figure you have to be very selective in the points you make for or against the argument we have lost some of our freedoms to be overall less free.
I've been pondering this post since I first saw it, and I have to say these are very good points, especially the first two sentences. To whites, things may seem more restrictive, to blacks, not so. Very good post.
Anyway, a lot of what I base the question on is the chipping away at our freedoms a small piece at a time. Not just federal or state governments, which is in our face all the time, but local city and county governments as well. Seems like every time I turn around my city is passing a new ordinance (or three). And these ordinances never give anything back, they always take something away.
For example, 5 years ago my city passed an ordinance outlawing parking on one side of the street in every new subdivision. The street widths haven't changed, just the restrictions. In a recent conversation with a councilman, he told me the city is drafting an ordinance to ban parking on one side of all existing residential streets in the city, the streets that weren't covered in the previous ordinance. Never mind that cars have parked just fine for the last 100+ years, no, this has only now become an issue.
In and of itself, the parking thing isn't huge, but it is a small piece of a larger problem, and that is simple things we've been able to do... things that really aren't harming anybody... are being taken away from us piece by piece. Maybe it's just me, but I find this to be a disturbing trend.
ETA: At what point do we consider everything pretty much done? When do we reach the point that it is a city's job to just maintain and stop with the new laws and restrictions?