Indeed, there are a host of those “legislation by regulation” irritations. There are other limitations today that did not exist in 1912, all the limitations placed on smoking being only some examples, but I’d suggest that the extent of individual freedoms available to the citizen is enormously larger in 2012 that in 1912.

There are many examples of this individual liberation. Women were not enfranchised until 1920, and official racial segregation was not outlawed until 1964. It wasn’t until the 1970s that the professional medical associations removed homosexuality from the list of mental disorders. The SCOTUS did not create the right to privacy until Griswold vs. Connecticut (1965), and then Roe vs. Wade (1973).

As for that contemporary icon of freedom, “Free Speech”, there really is hardly any comparison worth talking about. The Sedition Act of 1918, was upheld on appeal by the SCOTUS in 1919. The Alien Registration Act of 1940 was only rendered moot by them in 1957.

While I draw upon U.S. history for illustrations, I suggest that the same transformation is largely true throughout the Latin West. The last successful blasphemy prosecution in the UK was in 1976, and the White Australia policy wasn’t dismantled until the 1950s. So, while acknowledging contemporary constraints upon citizens that were absent in 1912, on balance I think the evidence of many more freedoms now than then is convincing.

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Eudaimonia