When you hear the word "liberty" today, you might think of romantic paintings of colonial heroes replete with white stallions, waving flags and tricorn hats. Or, you might think of an eloquent speech by your favorite visionary. Or, you might think of the gun-obsessed paranoid living in some backwater. Most importantly, you are probably thoroughly convinced that you are free, that you have liberty. Today, liberty is more of an abstraction, an obsession of a few complainers for whom nothing will ever be good enough. Today, the only people agitating about liberty are the grumbling misers who don’t want to pay their fair share of taxes along with everybody else or who want to maintain a private collection of dangerous military weapons with no conceivable use of social value. After all, haven’t we achieved equal rights for almost every imaginable social group? Sure, there remains more work to be done, but blacks are no longer openly and formally oppressed, women are paid a far lar...