What is Freedom?

Freedom. Everyone seems to be for it: liberals and conservatives, libertarians and progressives, hippies and buttoned-down capitalists. You cannot do politics without being for freedom – at least in the United States.

But if everyone is for freedom, why do all these factions oppose each other? How can they be enemies and yet be united in favor of the same thing? Is “freedom” a mere buzzword, a holdover from the days of the American Revolution? Or maybe the meaning of the word is ambiguous: each faction is saying something different when they use the word “freedom.” Just what is freedom, anyway?

You can pull out a dictionary for a stilted definition. I will define it simply: freedom is being able to do what you want to do. This definition encompasses the word root “free” in its myriad forms. Free speech and free beer both speak of freedom. If you want to mouth off or get drunk, then free speech and free beer are the freedoms for you. In general, political freedom and financial freedom both enable us do more of what we want to do; they both give us more options in life.

This simple definition works for all the factions above. It also explains why these factions are at each other’s throats. We cannot all be 100% free. At some point more freedom for me means less freedom for you. Allow me to illustrate:

I would like to spend more time writing (and rewriting) articles for this site. I would also start a more democratic stock exchange, create a new political party, write a new operating system, and develop some eco-technology moldering in my notebooks. Alas, I lack the time and finances to do these fun and useful things. I could do at least some of them if I were to receive money without having a day job. Financial freedom is freedom. But how to do this…I know! I’ll do what the government does: I’ll collect taxes. You are hereby required to pay your Milsted Tax. Estimate your income for the past year and sent me 1%. I’m cheaper than the U.S. government, and I won’t invade a Middle Eastern country without good reason. This is a bargain!

What? You don’t like the arrangement? Ah, my increased freedom decreases your freedom. There’s the rub…and the source of conflict. Different factions want different things, and in the process they traipse upon each others’ freedoms.

Libertarians thus call for allowing any freedom which does not infringe upon the freedom of others. Many libertarians define freedom as the right to do as you wish as long as it does not interfere with the equal rights of others. This is cheating. My freedom to collect The Milsted Tax is indeed a freedom, one which would enhance my overall freedom greatly.

Nonetheless, libertarians are right to decry such abusive freedoms. The freedom for some to steal or enslave reduces freedom overall. The master gains a farm implement or household appliance; the slave loses nearly everything. The libertarian dictum approximates maximizing freedom overall.

But does a libertarian society completely maximize freedom? Liberals and other leftists say not. Consider a working mom doing double shifts at the barbecue restaurant to pay her children’s medical bills in a low tax capitalist country. Now consider her coddled counterpart in a European welfare state. Her counterpart is freer, even though her government collects more (involuntary) taxes and aggressively regulates much of her life.

Financial freedom is freedom. Poverty turns economic relationships into power relationships. And so the modern liberal definition includes at some guarantee of income, or other needed benefits. More aggressive members of the Left would take more from the rich in the name of equality.

And yes, they have a point. But they often carry it way too far: think Soviet Russia, for example. But where is the optimum? At what point do taxes and regulations reduce freedom overall? This is a very difficult question, one which we’ll explore a bit later in this series. But frankly, this question is too hard to dwell on for long. Being a lazy mad scientist with a penchant for New Age graphics, I prefer to unask this question. The red buttons on the sidebar point to books explaining how to reduce government and reduce inequality and poverty at the same time. Why haggle over trade-offs when there are synergies to exploit?

Suppose we have government reduced to a minimum, and altruists from Alpha Centauri arrive with welfare handouts for all the world’s poor. Would this maximize freedom? Would the factional conflicts go away? Alas no. For there is another freedom, a fixed-sum freedom issue which cannot go away completely:

The Sigma Upsilon Xi brothers want to party until 2am; their neighbor wants to sleep at night. Hugh likes to hold swinging hot tub parties in his back yard; Mary wants to protect the innocence of her children. Earl likes his hemi-powered pickup; Ralph wants absolutely clean air. Timothy likes to explore altered states of consciousness using LSD and other chemicals; Bill wants to protect his children from such dangerous pastimes.

Freedoms collide. Cutting government or handing out welfare checks will not make these conflicts go away. And as the population grows, these conflicts grow worse as we live closer together. If these conflicts are not managed well, people resort to angry ideologies to get their way. They become drug warriors, no-nothings, racists, moral crusaders, conformists, anti-smoking zealots, militant environmentalists, or gated-community lawn police. Yes, some people are authoritarians simply because they want to exploit others, or manipulate them “for their own good.” This is anti-freedom. But people also become authoritarian in self-defense, to protect their third freedom: freedom from everyone else.

Freedom is multi-faceted and inherently conflicting. We cannot have it all, but we can have much more if we take a holistic perspective. On the other hand, those who look at only one facet can become wildly impractical, or even murderous. The path to mass suffering or even genocide lurks in each facet taken by itself. This includes that supposedly self-consistent ideal of liberty, the libertarian definition of freedom.

Next: Freedom from the Government

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