When I was a small child, living in the tidewater of Maryland, you could build a pier from your property into the water.
You could build a seawall to keep the river from washing your land away.
You could cut down trees in your yard, without problems, as long as you had the necessary skill.
You could go into the woods you owned and do the same, cruising the timber or clearing land, as you chose, and ever rounding up broken limbs and dead fall for firewood.
Of course that was before Earth Day, before the Army Corps of Engineers declared itself owner of the tidewater estuaries, before the National Scenic Rivers Act, before buffer zones and endangered species/protected animal setbacks...
By the time I graduated High School, you had to have a permit to build that pier, and if it wasn't replacing an existing structure, they were hard to get. Seawall construction was constrained by Corps of Engineers rules which demanded rip rap composed of rocks which were specified in size and type and had to be trucked in from hundreds of miles away because those rock were not out there in the coastal plain (the rip rap was less effective, too, and far more expensive).
By my second year of college, it took nine permits (per tree) for the folks to legally cut down two trees, trees which had been planted 150 years before by an ancestor who decided that part of the farm was not really good farmland.
Now vehicles need emissions inspections, trash has to be sorted, recycling, etc.
You tell me.
Freedom has diminished considerably in the last 60 years, at an accelerating rate.
