This is the nature of human energy; individuals generate it, and control it. Each person is self-controlling, and therefore responsible for his acts.… - Rose Wilder Lane

The question is whether personal freedom is worth the terrible effort, the never-lifted burden and risks of self-reliance.

[D]uring half a century, reactionary influences from Europe have been shifting American thinking onto a basis of socialistic assumptions. In cities and states, both parties began to socialize America with imitations of the Kaiser's Germany: social welfare laws, labor laws, wage-and-hour laws, citizens' pension laws, and so-called public ownership.

I came out of the Soviet Union no longer a communist, because I believed in personal freedom. Like all Americans, I took for granted the individual liberty to which I had been born. It seemed as necessary and as inevitable as the air I breathed; it seemed the natural element in which human beings lived.