I recently travelled around the Americas. I went from financially ravaged Argentina to third world Nicaragua and the subsistence economies of the Bolivian and Peruvian Andes. One passes through different booths to get different stamps and photocopies as well as paying an entrance fee to get into Nicaragua or Honduras. Everywhere I saw antiquated bureaucratic practices. I have never, however, been to a more over-regulated, paper-happy country than the United States, or one more mindlessly subservient to bureaucratic minutiae.

On entering the country, with no matter what passport, you are treated like a criminal or socio-economic migrant. Several forms need to be filled in, many of their requirements duplicated, unnecessary and arbitrary. This practice doesn't stop at international boundaries. There are occasional police checks on interstate roads, and even occasionally at state borders. Post 9/11 fear is all encompassing.

Rights are being eroded and regulations piled on like cheese and freedom fries at a burger joint. It seems that obesity and laughable laws have a bizarre relationship. In America, you can die for your country at 18, but you can't buy a beer until you are 21. In America you can kill on the roads with reckless driving at 15 in some states, but experienced drivers usually have to stay below 55 miles per hour or risk a ludicrously overpriced speeding ticket.

California is the worst state for this sort of thing. Their claim to liberalism extends as far as a blanket ban on smoking in public places, highly subsidised but under-used public transport, and ecological policies whose costs greatly out weigh their benefits. Their sales tax is one of the highest in the land, their public schools amongst the worst.

Much regulation is a deterrent to independence and enterprise. Liberty is not the freedom from (pollution or second hand cigarette smoke) but it is a freedom to make one's own choices (like how fast to drive, or what and when people are allowed to consume on your business premises. The American Land of the Free should look to more laidback, more liberal countries to see how it should be done.