Thoughts on Freedom

Jay Tea of Wizbang has an intriguing idea and I’ve decided to participate. He posted some “steam of consciousness” thinking into an entry and wants to see where we go with it.

Catalyst: talk show host refers to Massachusetts as “the cradle of liberty.”

First reactions: I’ve written a lot about Massachusetts — it’s not very free now.
“Freedom is the right to be responsible for one’s actions” — David Gerrold, “A Matter For Men.”
“” The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” — Thomas Jefferson
“Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose” — “Me and Bobby McGee”
“The Earth is the cradle of Humanity, but Mankind will not Stay in the Cradle Forever.” Konstantin Tsiolkovsky

Freedom is often born in adversity and struggle, but after a while gets tired of being taken for granted and moves on. The places where freedom is most prized now is probably Afghanistan (people waiting in line for hours to vote despite very credible threats of death) and eastern Europe — who spent decades under Communism’s heel.
Other places that haven’t fought and died for their freedom for generations (France, Germany, Canada, segments of the US) presume freedom is the natural state and slowly let their liberties slip away, to be taken by a willing government.
We’re lucky that “those who fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat it;” it gives us a chance to learn from our mistakes.

We all understand how fundamentaly important freedom is but the word’s also become a slogan. Freedom is more than just being able to do as you wish, whenever you wish, however you wish. It’s the ability to choose to restrict your behavior – to do as Gerrold (who shall eternally have my ire for not finishing the Chtorr series, by the way) says by owning the responsibility that comes with freedom. The freedom most folks think about is legislated freedom – the freedom from governmental tyranny and oppression, and the mechanism for getting it is pretty simple when you think about it.

What are not simple, and what can’t be legislated wholly, are the responsibilities that come with freedom and the awareness that it isn’t a given. That is, I believe, the biggest knock I can put on our educational system today. We teach too little world history and when we do, we excise from it the very notion that our free society is superior to those that aren’t free. America’s government is the same as China’s and Saudi Arabia’s and even the nascent EU. But they aren’t the same and we all, deep down, know that to be true.

But knowing it, deep down, is vastly different from remembering it on a regular basis and making sure it doesn’t slip away. Education is vitally important to remembering that. Seeing what other nations, including ours, have endured when we didn’t have the freedoms we have today and learning what other people have had to do to secure those freedoms for themselves, is critical to making sure that we don’t take our liberty for granted. If we don’t take it for granted, we will lose it as surely as other nations have throughout history. We have to proceed from the premise that the freedom we share here is the preferred way of living so that we can learn how never to lose it.

But I mentioned the idea of intentionally restricting our freedom. That tend to make some people run screaming for the high hills, but it’s a lot less sinister than it sounds. There are times – especially times of war – where our survival as a country and our security as individuals demand that we give our government more power to act (which necessarily restricts our individual liberties). We can split that difference between security and liberty, and we’ve done it before. What’s necessary is that knowledge of history and the realization that the power to change our government rests solely in our hands. We may choose to give the government more power, but we can also make that power a temporary thing. We can write terms of expiration directly into laws. We can ensure that, should the government grow unresponsive to our liberties, we retain the means to wrest control from it, by revolution if necessary. We can ensure that our elected officials never forget that they serve us and at our pleasure.

And we can vote Libertarian. Wait, sorry. That was just a shameless plug. I’m better than that.

Well, no, I’m not. Not even a little. Much of what the Libertarian party stands for have gone over the Cliffs of Insanity in recent decades, but the core idea of the party still works pretty well. Here’s what you need to remember. Those who founded this country left the bulk of the governmental power in our hands and the hands of our state and local governments. They did that for a reason. The closer the level of government is to the people, the less likely it is to become autocratic and controlling. State and local governments have connections to the people that the Federal government does not have and can never have. Don’t believe me? Try a little experiment in the next couple of months. Schedule a meeting with one of your Congressman or Senators, one of your State legislators, and a member of your local county commissioners or city council. Come back and tell me which one of them saw you first and how long it took to see them. I’ll bet that you already know how that would turn out.

And that, in a nutshell, is the core of Libertarian principle. Small government, local government, is more responsive, more efficient, and less likely to run amok and degenerate into tyranny. And they rarely, if ever, forget who it is they serve. That is the place where you can safely determine the level of freedom under which you choose to live and where freedom is best illustrated.

So those are some of my thoughts on freedom – at least as they pertain to Jay Tea’s post.

Now, tell me what you think.

No related posts.

Tags: China

Category: General