"L'homme est né libre, et partout il est dans les fers." Jean-Jacques Rousseau The Social Contract(1762).

Translated to English: "Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains"

Saw the movie "The Astronaut Farmer" this evening, and it rang a bell. It is a libertarian fantasy about a man living and chasing the American dream. Billy Bob Thornton plays Charles Farmer, a former pilot and aerospace engineer, living on a farm in Texas and secretly building a space ship in a barn behind his house. Charles Farmer and his wife and son and two daughters are icons - symbols of basic American values of family, independence, and the value of hard work.

Charles is thought to be insane by many of his neighbors, and when the Feds get wind of what he is up to, they threaten Charles that if he does launch, he'll be shot of the sky. They also send child protective services after his kids, immigration after the Mexican who helps out on the farm, and When an FBI agent answers his cell phone with a call from headquarters, and the cell phone ring tone is the theme for the Evil Empire in Star Wars, you know who the bad guy is.

Of course there would be legitimate safety concerns here: What if the home built rocket crashes into the middle of a city? In an age when we have terrorists hidden under every rock, could we really give people the freedom to fire space rockets from their back yards. But the film's underlying function is to make me remember that our ideal image of ourselves is that of individualistic risk takers. We celebrate the dreamers who were the ancestors of many of us: people who travelled across the oceans in pursuit of dreams.