Tortured, bleeding, dying, William Wallace used his last breath to hiss out the one word that was worth such a sacrifice... freedom.

At least that's the way Hollywood portrayed it. And history, unadorned by movie-makers' dramatics, seems to support the concept that the hero of old Scotland indeed was willing to give his life for this most precious and elusive commodity, as were his followers.

In fact, when you start trying to think of even the best-known examples of people who have died in the quest to be free the mind boggles.

Liberty or death. It's one of the founding principles of our republic, and that principle has been tested many times by those who would enslave us by force.

We are still the freest people in the history of the earth, but I wonder how long that will last.

There are always those who would overtake us by force and do away with the individual liberty we enjoy, and I'm always worried that we'll become too complacent and therefore vulnerable to that kind of threat. In fact, if current trends continue we'll run a greater and greater danger of displaying enough vulnerability that somebody will be tempted to give it a try.

But it's just possible that by that time there won't be any real freedom left to protect. More and more, we're becoming a nation of cowards not afraid to defend our nation if it comes to that, but afraid of freedom itself.

People don't bat an eyelash these days when you tell them that taxes make up a fifth of our nation's economy. Yet if a bank wants to charge an extra dollar for use of its ATM by people who don't have accounts at that bank, we demand that the government do something about it.

We want the government to control banks, doctors, insurance companies, cable companies, car makers, our own employers, forcing them all to give us what we want. We want a guaranteed income, guaranteed health care, a guaranteed education, guaranteed retirement... we want the government to make sure our needs are cared for from cradle to grave.

Government is more than happy to oblige. There are good people and bad people in government, but there is one characteristic that unites them all they are in government because they like to control things. Give them more power and more control and they will gleefully accept it, though many will do so with the most humanitarian of intentions.

If we go running to the government with our complaints about business, government will respond by controlling business, and soon the dream of starting and running your own business in order to earn a profit and build something meaningful will be over. You'll start a business if the government decides one is needed, you'll pay most of the "profit" in taxes, and innovation will be impossible because of the red tape involved.

We had a good example of that during the recent legislative session, as nursing homes lobbied for a bill requiring that people wanting to offer assisted living facilities go through the same certificate of need process that hospitals have to go through. This would have the effect of protecting the status quo, discouraging innovation and expanding government control over business.

Lobbyists wanting the government to protect their business interests by throwing stumbling blocks at their competition is a major threat to freedom in this country.

Another way the government controls is through the tax system. If government leaders want businesses or individuals to behave in certain ways, they "grant" tax incentives to elicit that behavior. That's the beauty of a complex tax system like the one we have now. It gives the government an amazing amount of control over people's lives, and instead of being angry at the loss of freedom people are ecstatic because they think they're being given a gift.

What makes this creeping loss of freedom so dangerous is that it's hard to fight it. You can form a revolutionary army, but whom do you attack? The American military... good, decent people who put on uniforms and defend our borders?

How do you get people to wake up and realize that the freedom for which so many have suffered and died is slowly being taken from us without a shot being fired?