Three Freedoms

For Liberty!---and occasional levity. Freedom Lessons is a meeting place to learn from and equip one another as we persuade others to embrace individual freedom. The goal? A lasting cultural preference for freedom, limited government, free markets, respect for the Constitution and rule of law, and a more sensible and strong national defense. That's all.

The task we take very seriously. Ourselves, well, not so much...

Three Freedoms

"The world has never had a good definition of the word liberty, and the American people just now are in need of one. We all declare for liberty: but in using the same word we do not mean the same thing...Here are two, not only different, but incompatible things, called by the same name, liberty."~~Abraham Lincoln

The word, freedom, is used in different ways. In light of the context in which it is used, "freedom" can have varyious meanings.

For our purposes, it is important to remember the three basic freedoms. For a fuller explanation, enjoy chapter one of "Liberty and Liberties" in F.A. Hayek's The Constitution of Liberty .

Political Freedom
It is possible to be politically free living under totalitarian rule. To be politically free, people have some choice of the laws and administration of their government. Access to voting for, or choosing, those in power who make and administer laws is a standard of political freedom. Citizens of Cuba can vote, as did the citizens of the former Soviet Union. The amount of freedom Cubanshave over the determining the course of their individual lives, however, is terribly little. As Hayek points out, "to choose one's government is not necessarily to secure freedom."

Conversely, people in America who cannot vote, such as resident aliens and foreign students, enjoy a wide range of choices and freedoms with which they hold the major influence over the course of their lives. Although such persons do not consent to the forms and execution of the laws, out of respect for liberty for all the laws protect the individual freedoms of those who are not politically free.

Individual Freedom
"We are concerned in this book with that condition of men in which coercion of some by others is reduced as much as is possible in society." So begins Hayek's The Constitution of Liberty, the first sentence of chapter one, just beneath the above Lincoln quote. Determining one's course in life with minimal coercion from the state is the cornerstone of individual liberty. A respect for individual liberty demands restrictions on the powers of the state so that freedom is not arbitrarily or unduly infringed, hence the Bill of Rights and other constitutional protections of the political fruition of individual rights, civil liberties.

We certainly have need to guard our political liberties. Infringement of our influence and control over our government via voting, outspoken dissent, peaceful assembly, and free speech (to name a few) is an attack on our liberties. But it is important to remember that our political liberties are not an end in themselves; political freedom is a vital means of protecting our individual liberties, of maintaining the balance between the legitimate security provided by the state on the one side and the existence and exercise of our individual liberty on the other.

"Inner" Freedom
Moral improvement, freeing oneself from vices that limit one's range of possibilities in life, is a form of freedom. In a free society people are free to live as they choose and persuade others to follow suit. Once the state uses the power of coercion to order people live by the dictates of the moral vision of a few, freedom takes a significant hit. Once the state coerces individuals "for their own good" the legitimacy of consent (popular government) is eroded. In order to offer up the consent that legitimizes the state's use of coercion, people must be truly free, not morally coerced.

Confusing inner freedom with individual freedom has led the way to institutional attacks on individual freedom. A vital part of the burgeoning socialist movement of the nineteenth-century relied on such confusion. The assumption went: people should be "free to" rise above their physical and moral impediments wrought by the industrialization of society. Hunger, lack of shelter, poor health, were viewed as obstacles to people's freedom to attain happiness in life. In order to remove these obstacles the powers of the state had to be vastly increased, and a regulatory and bureaucratic state needed created to reach into the lives of individuals and the workings of business in order to provide "freedom" to people. This new freedom was not a "freedom from" the powers of the state but a "freedom to," a power over others through the arm of the state. Americans progressives took this ball and ran with it, laying the foundation for FDR's Four Freedoms and the New Deal through Woodrow Wilson's "New Freedom."

As Hayek points out, it was the American progressive intellectuals like John Dewey who argued that "liberty is power, power to do specific things. Many times people supportive of political liberty and restrictions on government power and averse to "big government" will unflinchingly support federal legislation that greatly limits the individual liberty of Americans. Their support for such legislation comes from happening to agree with moral objectives of such legislation. They need remember the socialists perfected this game and that it will not always be their party in power writing the laws.