The “Ron Paul Liberty in Media Awards (RP/LIMA)” contains what I believe are some of the best and most stimulating articles about liberty and its evolution in the United States published on the Internet and in various print journals throughout a given year. It also recognizes some of the most outstanding personalities, journals and books involved with liberty issues in that year.

Putting so much commentary together in once place has a certain power. One may be dismayed by the gathering drumroll of receding freedoms catalogued by these articles. Reading one or two may incite passion or frustration — reading so many may give the reader a sense of the enormity of what must increasingly be seen as a concerted effort to regulate and police most every aspect of a citizen’s economic and private life.

The American conversation about liberty, gathering energy every day on the Internet, is not unique — other countries and other eras have evoked similar conversations. But the American conversation may have special poignancy because the Republic in which we live was set up to respect liberty and fundamental economic law. In this sense, the articles in LIMA, like thousands of other articles now appearing on the Net, may be seen as bearing witness to what may be the gradual collapse of this experiment.