Freedom has developed in a series of steps. Today we’re so immersed in freedom’s infrastructure that we barely see, barely appreciate, and don’t conserve this infrastructure.

Individual defense, both self-defense and the defense of other individuals, has been a fundamental need [1] from the start. The securing of individual defense reached a local high-water mark much later with the Second Amendment. The Second Amendment has long been under constant siege by socialists, who in the USA masquerade as Progressives.

Value-adding has always been needed. Improvements were made in many steps, both in producing products to meet people’s needs and wants, and in building up and sharing knowledge [2]. Customers’, savers’, and producers’ free choices are what add value [3], and what are attacked and taken away by socialists [4], [5].

Families emerged as the bedrock social organization, which provides each of its members strong support that helps meet their deepest needs and wants. The family is attacked by socialists.

The Bible preserved key knowledge of God, history, human behavior, and wisdom. Jesus’s sacrifice enabled people to grow closer to God despite their past sins and further sins [6]. Translating and printing the Bible helped more people more thoroughly [7]. God and the Bible are attacked by socialists.

Christian churches, like their progenitors, Jewish synagogues, provided teaching and community that further helped people grow closer to God. Churches and synagogues are attacked by socialists.

Interposition came when individuals were protected against greater magistrates by lesser magistrates using their powers [8]. This was facilitated by lesser magistrates having ways they could defend individuals; building power, often by value-adding; and pursuing personal salvation and closeness to God, which kept in check their envy and ultimately led them to choose to protect others despite great dangers to their own lives, liberty, and property. 

Interposition is systematically blocked by socialists. Socialists never interpose themselves, and socialists significantly limit lesser magistrates’ abilities to interpose themselves. Socialists limit lesser magistrates by organizing and controlling parties, governments, unions, corporations, and other organizations.

Secular institutions developed additional decentralized power that strengthened individuals in individuals’ competitions with governments [9]. Secular institutions are increasingly organized by or hijacked by socialists and then controlled by socialists.

Contracts—enforced at first by cooperation among value-adders, such as merchants [10], and enforced later by governments that supported common law—helped value-adders satisfy their own wants in additional ways by collaborating more-deeply with others. Contracts are coopted by socialists, through demanding and threatening to forcibly require actions that socialists labeled as equaling diversity, equity, inclusion, and more.

Joint-stock companies further increased the abilities of value-adders to satisfy their own wants by employing savings to satisfy customers [11]. Businesses, companies, and corporations are falsely maligned as uniquely self-interested and exploitive, by the antisocially self-interested socialists [12].

Insurance took the risk protection provided by joint ownership of stocks and spread it among larger, more-diversified groups of individuals. Loss prevention and loss mitigation aren’t targeted specifically by socialists. Instead, socialists promise to provide insurance themselves, and promote these plans not by allaying fears but by stoking fears.

Rather than reducing individual risks through individual defense, socialists support national defense, which ideally would be insurance. National defense weakens free people by setting aside massive resources for wars [13], and then brings on wars that aren’t needed for defense from direct attacks [14].

Rather than reducing individual health risks through individual prevention and therapy, socialists support public-health coercions [15]. Public health again weakens free people, here by interfering with free people using all available information and making their own best judgments of how to allocate personal resources to limit and mitigate personal risks [16].

In all, the infrastructure for freedom that we see in action all around us as part of ordinary life provides an extraordinary, rich set of capabilities. This infrastructure is under sustained, multipronged attack by socialists. And these capabilities have been overpowered by socialists in large regions, for as long as a natural lifetime, already—even without access to modern productivity, computers, and communications, which are even harder for individuals to defend themselves against.

Individual development, left to its natural course, has been described as following the doom loop [17].