The Erosion of Freedom
Encroachment has been worse in some times and places than in others.
In the 18th and 19th centuries, encroachments were relatively modest.
Of course those regimes were encroaching on the rest of the world, but that is a different topic. I am not suggesting that they were any more virtuous than any other gangsters, only comparing the position in Western lands then and now.
In the 20th century a Big-State mentality took root, and regimes began to strangle healthy human development ever-more deeply in ever-more ways. They:
plunder goods ("taxation");
restrict activities ("regulation");
feminise society ("equalisation").
Plunder is the easiest to measure in a single number. "Taxation as a share of national income" was always under 10% until around 1920. Since then it has grown relentlessly with only slight occasional rollbacks, and is now between 35% and 50% in Europe and about 30% in the US.
Restriction and Disruption are harder to measure, but they grew along with (and were funded by) the plunder.
Now, in the early 21st century, after all this creeping encroachment, dominant regimes are more encroachive than ever before. Here are some details.
Plunder
They seize nearly half of what we produce.
Strictly speaking, it is mainly only when we trade in the currrency they authorise (the "money economy") that they plunder us. But given how hard they make it to generate wealth in any other way, "half of what we produce" is accurate enuf for most purposes.
Much of the plunder is hidden in various forms of Taxation by Stealth: taxes on various levels of income, earning, spending, saving, living, dying etc. A favourite wheeze is to freeze money thresholds in times of inflation to conceal the reality of raising the tax by lowering real thresholds.
Restriction
They restrict our freedom to live in the way we choose.
They force us to self-protective measures beyond what we deem good.
They prevent us from enforcing contracts of employment (Trade Union Immunities, known as "the right to strike").
They hinder us from burning fossils and building shelters.
They repress opinions they fear may threaten their power, and monitor us to scan for such opinions. They can not only monitor your Internet activity but also activate the microphone of your phone and listen to nearby conversations. As at 2024 they probably do this with under 1% of the population, the ones they have noted as suspects, but that category will probably grow as the scope of censorship grows.
They even hinder us from getting help to die in the manner we choose.
Feminisation
Their aim is to destroy Androcracy, to usurp men's role as family leaders by setting themselves up as the all-providing and all-protecting Big Brother.
They bribe women to rebel, and persecute men who try to enforce domestic order. Some regimes are especially keen on this. For instance, in Britain, the regime sometimes places "domestic violence" at the head of their lists of the most appalling crimes, ahead of mere murder and well ahead of theft. This campaign is spectacularly counterproductive, as artificially restraining the instinct leads to pent-up frustration that overflows in anger and more "domestic violence" than would have occurred otherwise.
In the UK, the regime will pay anyone to care for children ... except their mother! (The attack on family life has probably gone further here than anywhere else, but the trend is the same.
(There are plenty more examples.)
Given the chance they will raise all children in State Nurseries to regard unwoke statements as not so much false as ungrammatical, literally unthinkable, as Orwell warned in "1984".