Freedom Quote by Lyn Nofziger

Freedom gets framed here like a scarce resource: “commodity,” “precious,” something you can lose in a bad trade. That word choice isn’t accidental. It yanks the idea of liberty out of lofty civics and drops it into the market logic of postwar American conservatism, where government is cast as an ever-expanding buyer with a habit of taking more than it pays for. “Eternally vigilant” is the rhetorical accelerant: it implies the threat is constant, not episodic; the default setting of the state is encroachment. The line flatters the reader into a posture of alert citizenship while also cultivating suspicion as a virtue.

The subtext is a familiar Cold War-and-after storyline: your real antagonist isn’t an invader, it’s your own bureaucracy. Nofziger, a well-known Republican operative and Reagan-era figure, spoke from a political culture that treated regulation, taxation, and social programs not as policy choices but as moral hazards - slippery on principle, not merely debatable on outcomes. “Government will take it all away” is maximalist by design; it collapses complex tradeoffs into a high-stakes zero-sum.

Then comes the pivot that makes the argument feel less like paranoia and more like ethics: “Individual freedom demands individual responsibility.” That’s the disciplining clause. It smuggles in a social contract without calling it one: you can keep your freedom only if you behave in ways that don’t invite governance. Read another way, it’s a warning shot at dependency, not just state power. The intent isn’t simply to praise liberty; it’s to define the “good citizen” as self-reliant, skeptical, and politically mobilized against the growth of government.