When people are convinced they are free, they have no reason to want to join up with us libertarians in our effort to establish a genuinely free society. Instead, they simply view libertarianism as a "weird" philosophy that purports to achieve what we already have — a free society.

One can only hope that the recent killings of 37-year-old Renée Good and 37-year-old Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, both of whom were regular American citizens, will enable at least some Americans to break through the inches-thick indoctrination that has encased their minds and that has convinced them that they live in a free society. After all, how can a society genuinely be considered free when the government wields the omnipotent power to kill anyone it wants?

And make no mistake about it: As we have seen, U.S. officials have the omnipotent power to kill any American they want. That's a harsh reality that so many Americans still do not want to accept. They'd rather remain convinced that they live under the same governmental structure on which our nation was founded, one in which the federal government's powers were limited and restricted by the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

So many Americans do not want to face reality — that this is a very different type of government — one that is every bit as brutal and ruthless as totalitarian-like regimes throughout history and one that wields such omnipotent powers as killing, torture, and indefinite detention without due process and trial by jury.

Consider the drug war, one of the most tyrannical powers that any totalitarian-like government, even one whose officials are democratically elected, can wield against its own citizens. Look at how many people they have killed over the years with this aberrant governmental program.

Indeed, just look at those 100-plus people they've just killed in cold blood on the high seas using the drug war as their justification. That's what's called the exercise of brutal and ruthless omnipotent power. No one is ever going to be prosecuted or convicted for killing those people.

But Americans have let them get away with drug-war ruthlessness and brutality, year after year, decade after decade. Never mind that U.S. officials never get even close to "winning" their drug war. What matters is that U.S. officials be permitted to continue waging it, even if that has meant the destruction of our very own freedom at the hands of our very own government.

A dark irony in the destruction of our freedom is the fact that the federal government oftentimes creates the problem that it then uses as the excuse to further destroy our freedom. For example, take drug cartels. They don't exist in a genuinely free society because drugs are legal in a genuinely free society. Thus, in a free society, drugs are sold by pharmacies and other reputable businesses, and drug cartels and drug gangs simply do not exist.