A Gilded Cage, Is Still a Cage

And We are in it

Welcome, once again, my dear readers to the asylum.  I often hear ‘Oh, America is the freest country on the planet’ when people are trying to defend the most recent loss of freedom their team supports.  This question begs two others. First, is this actually true? Second, if it is true does it matter?  I personally don’t think it matters if America is the freest country in a group of unfree countries.  To me, that is like saying one guy is the least violent because he only murdered three people and all the other murderers killed four or more.  What does it matter, he is still a murderer?  To be honest, even if America is the freest country on the planet, I don’t think it matters because America isn’t a free country.  I think almost all of what was known as the free world has slipped into effectively equal levels of tyranny, and it is my hope by the time you are done reading this week’s post you understand my point and agree with me.

I think first we need to talk about what freedom is and what freedom isn’t.  Anarchy isn’t freedom, as whoever is the strongest is free and everyone else isn’t.  Freedom requires two things: the ability for an individual to exercise all of their negative rights and their ability to exercise valid positive rights free from the initiation of force or fraud.  Negative rights are rights that exist without obligation or action by anyone or anything else.  For example, anyone can be secure in their person just by existing. The only way one can lose this right is by the action of another.  The right to speak or express one’s self without obligating anyone else.  Essentially, just because one person says it others do not have to listen.  Note, that there is no right not to be offended or upset by the expression of others because the individual alone is responsible for their feelings.  A positive right does obligate others to exercise them and to be legitimate positive rights must be obtained in one of two ways without coercion.  The first is by means of gifting.  If I invite you to my home for dinner then you have a positive right to eat the food provided (since it is free, this is gifting) or if I give you something then you have the right to take that item from me and I lose any claim to the item.  The second is by means of exchange or contract.  All exchange is a form of contract where one person agrees to provide something to another person for something else.  Failure to deliver on a valid positive right, especially in a contract, is fraud.  For a society to be free there must be a mechanism to enforce legitimate positive rights. This video here explains the types of rights very well.

No matter how good and honest most folks are there are always going to be assholes that will choose to imitate force or fraud on others to prohibit them from utilizing both their negative and positive rights.  Unfortunately, that means we need somebody who can protect the majority from the minority, and that means at some level there needs to be a government, unfortunately.  With a strong desire for freedom, what then would or should the government look like?  In my view, the only valid functions of government are as follows: The government must protect its people from the initiation of force or fraud, enforce contracts, and accomplish those functions without initiating force or fraud on its people.  Please note that not initiating is not the same as not using.  It is immoral to initiate force or fraud, but it is fine to respond to the initiation of force with force in order to protect yourself, your family, or your property from harm.  It might be easier to think about it this way, a valid government derives its abilities from those whom it governs.  As a result, its valid abilities are limited to those of the individual, even if at a larger scale.  For example, if an individual is just walking down the street and is attacked, they have the right to defend themselves from the attacker.  Just so the government has the right to form armies and then use them to defend its lands and people.  The individual doesn’t have the right to take resources from another individual against their will and then give those resources to someone they think has a larger need for them.  As such, any time the government does something that an individual couldn’t rightly do it is tyrannical and invalid.