DH> Would you please tell which nations are freer, and why?
 
        It depends upon which aspect of freedom your are speaking of.
Liberty is not a singular thing, but something that manifests itself in
many ways and in many forms.  Seven nations, for instance, are rated as
having greater ecconomic freedom than the United States.  In most
European nations restrictions on smoking and mandatory seat-belt
requirements do not exist, arguably making individuals in those
nations, at elast in some ways, freer than Americans.  There are
several nations who directly elect their presidents, something we do
not do, which would indicate a greater breath of political freedom.  
We can, if you choose, go up and down the list of liberties combining
and recombining various freedoms and measuring one antion against the
other arriving at qualitive conclusions as to which is more free and
which is less, but when it comes to the daily lives of Americans, we
are not at all a free people.  We are so harassed by our government, so
inundated with petttly laws and restriction, and so requylated in
every aspect of our lives, I think anyone who would honestly beleive
that peoples in other nations are even less free, need take a long hard
look at both the linmited freedoms they posess and how other peoples
live.
 MA> to personal freedoms, we are a quite unfree people.
 MA> If you wish to consider the state of liberty in the United
 MA> States consider the plight of it's population.  We have the dubious
 MA> distinction of not only having the largest percentage of our
 MA> population in prison of any nation on Earth, we even have more people
 MA> in prison than any other nation, including communist China whose
 MA> population is ten times our own.  When you also consider that almost
 MA> 80% of those languishing in American prisons are there not for violent
 MA> crimes against others or their property, but for having violated
 MA> someone else's preferences of how they choose to live thier lives, I
 MA> believe the question of the state of American liberty becomes a quite
 MA> valid one.
DH> I would have to see some sort of proof of this.
 
      It's a matter of record.  The report I saw, several years ago, 
 was a report issued by Amnesty International.  Since that time
incarceration levels have continued to skyrocket in the UNited States
and there is no reason for me to believe such a statement would be
inaccurate today.
      The relly interesting part of all of this is that the vast, vast,
majority of American citizens languishing in Americna prisons, have
never committed a crime against another person or their property, but
instead, have been arrested and placed in prison for simply living
their lives in a manner others disapprove of.  The prison system,
rather than serving it's intended purpose of protecting society from
those would would otherwise harm others or their property, has become
an enormous social engineering tool.
 
DH> Again, which nations of the world have greater liberty, and why?
 
          And again, it depends upon which of the array of liberties
you are speaking of.  In many ways, nations such as Honduras or Mexico
are freer than the United States, and in other ways they are less free.
 
 
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