Consider this: Few Americans can afford to lead self-determinant lives in today's America.
Sure Tiger Woods, Lebron James, Warren Buffet, Henry Kissinger, Mark Cuban, Meryl Streep and Oprah Winfrey lead self-determinant lives-of a sort; as their wealth and prestige insulates them from the daily grind, navigating the traffic at the mall, getting stuck in traffic jams, coping with flight rage and sleeping in airports etc.
The problem is that for many Americans living outside the U.S. wealth & prestige bubble there aren't many independent paths available that do not depend on some sort of government program or hand out. These programs that got woven into the American socio-economic fabric starting with Roosevelt and moving on with the arrival of mega scientific and social engineering projects.
https://fee.org/articles/the-growth-of-government-in-america/

But your comments harken back to Lincoln's Days and days before that when there was no income tax and every man wanted his rifle, 40 acres and a mule.

The good thing about the Second World War was we won it. The bad thing was embedding government coercion, planning boards, and centralized lobbying driven financial incentives.
Outside Forces Shaped this bad karma vortex too.
The cost and complexity of the atom bomb made it damn difficult to escape from centralized decision making.
Recall, The Tennessee Valley Authority had a lot of centralized government decision making driving in it and nobody complained in 1933.
More than that, the type of person who would fit in to this new social model was more often than not an organization man not a mountain man.

We do have a few mountain men left, but most of them live in red states, are partial to the survival niche or are snipers in the U.S. Army.

The organization man herd mentality still rules in big government as is illustrated by the fact that the lions share of executive positions in think tanks, big pharma, law firms, non profits and corporations is populated by Harvard grads plus the trailing Ivys.
They may be the brightest, but for sure they are not always the best.
It was not always this way.
Procedures & tax codes are too ingrained, the psychic rewards are skewed and the U.S. has lost a lot of its mojo

Footnote

1. I guess M.I.T has enough endowment to survive for two years, so why don't they try weaning themselves off of Federal Grants, DARPA and other sinecures?
2. Why not just embargo Harvard and LSE grads from government service and see what happens?