Nine years earlier, Haggard had scoffed at potheads and draft dodgers in a White House performance of his song "Okie from Muskogee" for President Richard Nixon. But reflecting widespread loss of faith in the American dream in the 1970s,his "free life" song lamented Nixon's lies, the Vietnam debacle, and the ravages of inflation.

The issue of lost freedoms helped spur me 30 years ago to write a book titled Lost Rights chronicling how "Americans' liberty is perishing beneath the constant growth of government power." When I recently updated the political damage report in a book titled Last Rights, in hindsight, the late twentieth century seemed practically a golden era of freedom, federal, state, and local governments have unleashed themselves from the Constitution and commandeered vast swaths of Americans' lives. The worst regulatory abuses of the 1990s still exist and plenty of new bureaucratic depredations have been added to the lineup. 

In the 1990s, federal regulators censored beer bottles, prohibiting breweries from revealing the alcohol content on the label. That prohibition ended but federal censorship multiplied a hundredfold. On July 4, 2023, federal judge Terry Doughty condemned the Biden administration for potentially "the most massive attack against free speech in United States history," including "suppressing millions of protected free speech postings by American citizens," as a federal appeals court ruled last September. The Supreme Court will issue a bellwether ruling on that case before July. 

Haggard's insights

"I wish a buck was still silver" was the first line of Haggard's song. The U.S. Congress declared in 1792 that silver and gold were the foundation of the nation's currency. From 1878 onwards, the U.S. government sold silver certificate with this declaration: "This certifies that there is on deposit in the Treasury of the United States of America One Dollar in Silver Payable to the Bearer on Demand." In 1967, Congress passed the Act to Authorize Adjustments in the Amount of Outstanding Silver Certificates, "adjusting" the certificates by nullifying all further silver redemptions. President Lyndon Johnson removed silver from the nation's coinage in the mid-1960s.