Liberty or Freedom
Simply put, communication takes place when both the speaker and the listener agree to the definition of the terms.
English speakers all agree that left and right are the same for everyone. More than just convenient, that agreed use is very helpful for driving safety.
Some phrases are not always so helpful but we agree that the meaning is uniform. The sun doesn’t set, but that’s easier than saying the rotation of the earth has reached the point where the sun is not visible. And, sunset has a romance the slightly more technical version misses.
Most of our daily interactions with people happen pretty efficiently. In an office or work environment where a colloquial or job-specific jargon is necessary, everyone in the know gets along rather effortlessly.
Snags, of course, do happen. At such times, the simple request for clarification should clear up the issue.
Other times, however, a term represents an idea which is acknowledged to mean different things to different people. The term liberty, for example.
Patrick Henry’s famous closing line, “give me liberty or give me death”[1] is very passionate and ranks liberty very high. Liberty meant more to Henry than life itself.
The question is at least, what is liberty?
Liberty from or liberty to?
Thomas Jefferson wrote often and well about liberty. Patrick Henry also wrote and spoke of liberty. Almost certainly no one hearing Henry’s speeches was in doubt about what he meant by liberty. For Henry, liberty was the language of young America. And it spoke freedom from oppressive governments.
Jim Powell wrote in his article FEE.org that, “[Jeffeson] affirmed that all people are entitled to liberty, regardless of what laws might say. If laws don’t protect liberty, he declared, then the laws are illegitimate, and people may rebel.”[2]
As plain as that seems, there remains some wiggle room. Jefferson was also quite plain on laws against the Constitution being invalid and of no weight.
How could the idea, the concept, that liberty is not bound by laws be contorted to mean almost the opposite?
Blame the Big Three
To the progressives, liberty from means liberty from want or unemployment or overwork or poor wages or fear. How you get that kind of liberty is with government policy.
Teddy Roosevelt, in a speech during the 1912 campaign for President and a member of the newly formed Bull Moose party, criticized Woodrow Wilson for his position on liberty.
“ ‘The liberty of which Mr. Wilson speaks today means merely the liberty of some great trust magnate to do that which he is not entitled to do. It means merely the liberty of some factory owner to work haggard women over-hours for under-pay and himself to pocket the profits. It means the liberty of the factory owner to close his operatives into some crazy deathtrap on a top floor, where if fire starts, the slaughter is immense. It means the liberty of the big factory owner—who is conscienceless, and unscrupulous—to work his men and women under conditions which [inaudible] their lives like an [inaudible]. It means the liberty of even less conscientious factory owners to make their money out of the toil, the labor, of little children. Men of this stamp are the men whose liberty would be preserved by Mr. Wilson. Men of this stamp are the men whose liberty would be preserved by the limitation of governmental power. We propose, on the contrary, to extend governmental power in order to secure the liberty of the wage workers, of the men and women who toil in industry, to save the liberty of the oppressed from the oppressor. Mr. Wilson stands for the liberty of the oppressor to oppress. We stand for the limitation of his liberty not to oppress those who are weaker than himself.’ ”[3]
Notice the force of government thought necessary to secure liberty. That is exactly the opposite of Jefferson’s and Henry’s concept of liberty. Roosevelt means liberty from employer abuse and exploitation. Henry means liberty to live as men with inherent, inalienable rights.
There’s the rub
Woodrow Wilson gave a speech at Independence Hall in Philadelphia on July 4, 1914, to celebrate the 138th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.
Wilson mentions liberty and says liberty, “does not consist, my fellow-citizens, in mere general declarations of the rights of man. It consists in the translation of those declarations into definite action. Therefore, standing here where the declaration was adopted, reading its businesslike sentences, we ought to ask ourselves what there is in it for us. There is nothing in it for us unless we can translate it into the terms of our conditions and of our lives.”[4]
Translate he says. As if the words were not plain enough. Nothing in it for us he says as if the blessings of freedom and liberty have perished.
But, he’s up to something. He means to turn the Declaration on its head by ignoring the words written in the context of the time and interpreting those words in 1914 terms. This is a clever trick and one which will be used by many progressives to decide the Constitution reads as the reader prefers, not as Madison intended or the ratifying conventions accepted.
In 1911 Wilson delivered a speech to the Jefferson Club of Los Angeles and said, “the business of every true Jeffersonian is to translate the terms of those abstract portions of the Declaration of Independence into the language and problems of his day. If you want to understand the real Declaration of Independence, do not repeat the preface.”[5]
Wilson’s position is almost a throw-away line, do not repeat the preface. The preface frames the entirety of the thinking of both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution for it is in the preface we read that men “are endowed by their Creator . . . .”[6] Wilson also does clever wordplay to undermine the Founders, rattling to the core the very beliefs the American public held.
God, the Creator, is the very foundation on which the liberty of Henry and Jefferson and Madison lay. Wilson is suggesting the Declaration is outdated and quaint, that the American people of 1914 will accept a new version, one of progress from the old, ancient ways.
If a building’s foundation is poor, it cannot stand. The Progressives aim to rebuild that foundation with a false god, to put faith in the educational elite, they who know better. They, the elite, will decide the decisions so you don’t have to.
The Progressive approach
The big picture doesn’t work. Progressives-nay, politicians at all-devise plans and policies to address every concern and tax the citizens for the funds to pay for it. The very issue of personal property rights, what is mine and not yours, is the matter to discuss vis-à-vis liberty.
Economics and liberty, it turns out, are intricately related. Personal property rights are the issue. If I own it I can sell it, someone can steal it, or a third party can be assigned to mediate a dispute of ownership. In the last, I may lose the right to the thing that is mine by that third party. The key in these examples is ownership. The car or house or diamond ring is mine under private property rights.
Liberty is developing another layer of meaning which will come full circle.
The selling of my thing is the voluntary exchange between me and the buyer. If we both agree that we are better off with after the exchange than before, that’s a success. Buyer and seller trade and are happier for it. Not middle man, no policy, no government.
That voluntary act, to do as one pleases, is what I think Henry was getting at. The interference of the state in that voluntary action today is sometimes overlooked or simply accepted as so. Get a hair cut from a non-licensed barber. Drink a glass of raw milk. Each of these comes with government interference. With government interference, there is no liberty.
The cousin’s big stick
Teddy Roosevelt quipped “speak softly and carry a big stick.” His cousin, Franklin Roosevelt, used the government as his big stick.
Freedom from starts with Roosevelt’s 1941 State of the Union speech in which he mentions four freedoms: “the freedom of speech, the freedom of worship, the freedom from want, and the freedom from fear . . . .”[7]
Roosevelt ends the speech with this statement, “[f]reedom means the supremacy of human rights everywhere.”[8] Everywhere is a theme throughout the speech. Those 4 freedoms were to be “everywhere in the world.”
Loosely stated, a right is something you already have and cannot be taken from you and does not require the labor of another. You are free to speak and defend yourself. Only by the force of another can you be threatened to stop speaking or defending, but those rights cannot be taken from you.
Conversely, you do not have the right to take groceries from the store because you are hungry or enter someone’s home for shelter unless you are invited. You don’t have a right to health care because the doctors don’t work for free.
Rights, liberty, and freedom are big ideas. They are inter-related and that makes them blend a bit. The right to say something is to have the freedom, the liberty, to say that something.
Liberty today is regarded as a fringe idea. Those who speak about it are rarely taken seriously. Liberty-minded politicians are not in the mainstream and that’s part of the problem. Liberty is marginalized. Supporters of liberty are seen as the tin-foil-hat wearing freaks, pining for a day-long since gone.
Seeing liberty in that light says something about their devotion to a government which the liberty from government folks find equally bizarre.
How to square the terms?
The puzzle starts with using one word to explain the other.
Liberty is the freedom to do as you wish. Of course, there are natural laws you may not violate. You may not steal and you may not offensively harm, or murder-and more, another.
Freedom is the absence of state interference. That’s not very elegant but it means the force of the state doesn’t interfere with your day to day goings-on.
Henry wanted liberty or nothing at all. That’s a bold position. Freedom was included in his idea of liberty.
The puzzle ends
The political climate in the US in early 2020 is zesty. Blame is applied to both parties each from the other. Blame is useless for it offers no solution.
America’s heritage, the founding, offers us a path. Maybe not the only path and certainly not the easiest path, but a path nonetheless. The path of independence is that path and is shown in places like California and Oregon with the State of Jefferson 51 movement to secede or the secessionists in the state of Washington and various counties in various states wishing to secede from their respective states.
As the country grew, as presidents sought ever-increasing power, usurpation of power, which was not in the job description, the country has moved toward a centralized government and away from the general government which was intended and ratified. As this happens, the liberty Henry staked his life to preserve is destroyed. The natural rights to speech and self-defense are violated. The speech we can use to find our path from the mess that was slowly created dwindles.
Economist Thomas J. DiLorenzo offered this as our path, “ [p]eaceful secession and nullification are the only means of returning to a system of government that respects rather than destroys individual liberty.”[9]
A terrible war was fought over and about secession. Secession started the country. As a practice, it has been defended numerous times by many presidents including one saying this, “‘Any people whatsoever have the right to abolish the existing government and form a new one that suits them better. This is a most valuable, a most sacred right.’”[10] The speaker is Abraham Lincoln.
The people spoke in 1776 and in the ratification votes. The people need to speak again for a return to a general government as offered in the Constitution as ratified. Each state stands as a nation itself which makes the general government general again.
[1] https://www.bartleby.com/268/8/13.html
[2] https://fee.org/articles/thomas-jeffersons-sophisticated-radical-vision-of-liberty/
[3] http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5722/
[5] https://books.google.com/books?id=-TiAirQlOYoC&pg=PA323&dq=”the+business+of+every+true+jeffersonian”&hl=en&sa=X&ei=jExJT6i7BrKDsAKOoPXqCA – v=onepage&q=”the business of every true jeffersonian”&f=false
[6] https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration-transcript
[7] https://www.fdrlibrary.org/four-freedoms
[9] https://www.lewrockwell.com/2000/11/thomas-dilorenzo/secession-and-liberty/
[10] Ibid
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