A brief aside about the current politics of the U.S.

It should be clear to you that neither side cares about individual freedom. The arguments are merely about which rights you are going to concede. The liberals want to first take away your right to defend your property and yourself, then to take your property and redistribute it according to their whims. The conservative party want to control your body: who you marry, what sort of sex acts you perform, what you do on sunday mornings, and what substances you ingest.
With the exception of whatever issue is up for debate currently, every other right is either assumed to be given, or assumed to be denied. The middle ground is always moving, the rights that people were arguing for 50 years ago are not the arguments of today. 50 years ago the arguments were over whether or not blacks should be treated the same as whites. This is not up for review in today's election. Just like whether or not they should pay a tax to the British on tea was not up for review then. Every time a new right is issued, several others are quietly taken away. Politicians can do this by making a lot of noise about the issue of the day while quietly acting upon issues that no one had thought about.

Someone should really write a book that would compare and contrast the actual day to day personal freedoms of people before and after major historical events. I fear the data would be hard to find however.

No Peace

People advocate a peaceful world generally without mentioning exactly how it can come about and how stasis would be achieved.
As I see it there are two types of peace, each of which satisfies only one of two requirements, stability and individual freedom. It is easy to imagine a peaceful world in which one person or body of persons has a monopoly on force to such an extent that no one dares oppose them. The only problem is, in Jefferson's words:

"A government big enough to give you everything you want is strong enough to take away everything you have"

And I think most people see the problem with centralization when taken to this extreme. On the other hand we have a peace made up of the precarious balancing of force between powers. This can at any scale desired, from hunter gatherer tribes up to the cold war, back down to two men, each armed with a shotgun. This is not a stable situation, as any shift in the balance can result in a total collapse. Libertarians often espouse a return to city-states, forgetting how easily the city-states of Machiavelli's time fell to the invading French.
Others speak of somehow engineering violence out of us. This might be eventually possible, but will it be forced on us? that seems a type of violence itself. Humans are basically geared for three things: finding food, having sex, and killing. trying to engineer any of these basic drives out of us is going to have unintended consequences.