Left, right, blah blah. Nothing should impede a human's right to travel in a country that values human rights. Traveling is an acknowledged right (as used to be bearing arms), and today's infrastructure is biased towards the automobile. It's all the variables and multipliers on societal control and technology that muddy the situation.
Subcategories and agencies all conspire to control people. And as quality of life and medicine go up, so does the population. More people = more dumb people, and dumb people need direction. see McDonald's coffee cups and the growing number of warning signs and the like. Before WW2 the US and most other "developed" countries practiced eugenics; that is preventing obvious mental and physical defects to breed. Now that Hitler perverted genetic manipulation and ironically and inevitably medicine keeps getting better, so has the average quality of person gone down. Advances in technology have also caused a shift in mental equilibrium..but I digress.
Anyway, the licensing system does prevent many people from traveling legally. While I personally believe that people should be licensed to exceed certain speeds with large loads, there's little other choice for people who have to travel. The materialistic nature of most humans and relatively cheap goods means we have stuff, and it's hard to move to a new home with a donkey and carts today, let alone a bicycle and trailer.
The fathers of the US prolly didn't foresee a lot of things the average citizen has these days, and such resulting interpretations have our system in a quandary.