How Free 'The Land of the Free'?

For anyone who has followed my blog for even a short period of time, it should certainly be obvious that I believe in freedom. Not the freedom that is sold to us by our schools, politicians, and/or the media. They mouth the word but I question if they truly understand it's meaning. No, true freedom. True choice in one’s life. True choice in one’s private property. Untainted by government intervention.
I believe in an individual's right to choose. I believe that as long as a personal choice does not involve an injury to another’s person or property, the government has no Constitutional right to involve itself in that choice.
I believe our freedoms, personal, economical, and social, are constantly under attack. They are taken by our ‘lawmakers’ and ‘judges’ under the guise of a better world or ceded by our very neighbors due to their own personal neurotic fears.
There are too many laws already. Thousands upon thousands of laws that tell us,...No, coerce us, through the threat of loss of liberty or property, how to act. Yet every year congress, and now even the judiciary, seem to find a need to force ‘we the people’ to follow whatever flavor of the month laws they seem to need to create.
What brought out my freedom ‘high horse’ this AM was this.... I stumbled across The Heritage Foundation/Wall Street Journal’s annual study on the world's economies. According to the study, published as The 2005 Index of Economic Freedom, the USA finished a mere 12th. It doesn’t really surprise me, but I wish that it did. Again, we finished 12th. Shouldn’t the country founded on the very pursuit of liberty rank higher in it’s economic freedoms than Chile, Luxemburg, and Estonia?