An Excerpt from My Upcoming Opus on Liberty

This post may contain affiliate links. Please read our disclosure for more information.

Since today is Independence Day, and since I think this day should include some reflection on liberty, I decided to share an excerpt from my upcoming opus on liberty: The Groovy Guide to Liberty.

Here it is.

Freedom is good.

And it’s good because autonomy is good—your pursuit of happiness doesn’t have to compete with the wants or needs of others. No one other than you tells you what to do or what to think. No one other than you decides how your time should be occupied, how your paycheck should be spent, how your sympathies should be allocated, how your values should be prized, and how your rebellious impulses should be quenched. You’re not only the king of your castle; you’re the supreme allied commander of your life.

But freedom isn’t always good.

There is larceny and barbarism in every person’s heart, and ignorance and bias in every person’s brain. As such, man isn’t built for absolute freedom. If there were no government around to impose an elementary level of civility and rationality on all of us, life in America would be pretty bleak. The strong would be free to torment the weak. The cunning would be free to fleece the naive. And the irrational would be free to block most if not all of the collective actions needed to greatly improve everyone’s quality of life (sadly, things such as roads, tunnels, bridges, dams, levees, sewers, water treatment plants, landfills, and power stations can’t be built and maintained without strong-arming some portion of the public).

Welcome to the puzzle of liberty. Freedom in general is good, but too much freedom is bad. How, then, do we achieve the right amount of freedom? In other words, how do we check freedom justly? How do we distinguish bad freedoms from good freedoms, and how do we make sure our government only checks bad freedoms and leaves good freedoms alone?

When freedom is checked unjustly, you get some form of tyranny. Communism, fascism, dictatorship, Jim Crow, and crony capitalism are all examples of what happens when society does a poor job of distinguishing bad freedoms from good freedoms. Good freedoms are deemed bad and checked, and bad freedoms are deemed good and left alone. The government, rather than being a force for good, is turned into an instrument of plunder. When freedom is checked justly, however, you get liberty. Every citizen has all the freedom he needs to honorably pursue happiness because only bad freedoms are deemed bad and checked. Good freedoms are deemed good and left alone. The government is thus perfectly aligned with man’s highest ideals. It doesn’t exist to pamper the politically strong at the expense of the politically weak; it only exists to keep the peace and promote the general welfare.

For 249 years now we’ve been trying to check freedom justly without success. One reason why liberty has proven to be so elusive is simple: achieving liberty is freaking hard. Man, as already pointed out, is a terribly flawed creature. His habit of being covetous, vicious, impulsive, ignorant, and foolhardy doesn’t miraculously go away when he votes, secures a government job, or wins an elective office. It is therefore extremely difficult to stop the government from ever being contemptuous of some private citizen’s wallet or rights. Also, there isn’t always a clear line between liberty and tyranny. Social Security, for instance, certainly checks your freedom. But does it do so unjustly? Maybe. Others tell you how a portion of your paycheck should be spent. But in return for less control over your paycheck, you get a guaranteed monthly allowance in old age. And that might come in handy if you’re a spender and can’t save. But what if you never make it to old age? You die in your 50s. Where does all the money you contributed to the system go? Would Social Security be more compatible with liberty if it were voluntary, or if you could direct the old-age portion of your Social Security contributions to a privately-held IRA instead? Perhaps. The point here is that there’s a lot of gray area between liberty and tyranny, and man can’t always be faulted for getting it wrong.

While achieving liberty is no doubt hard, I am loath to use that unpleasant reality as an excuse. Hard doesn’t mean impossible. Putting a billion transistors on a silicon wafer that can fit on the tip of your finger is hard too. But man figured out how to do that. Is the puzzle of liberty more challenging than the puzzle of modern semiconductors?

No, the main reason we haven’t achieved liberty isn’t because it’s hard to do. The main reason we haven’t achieved liberty is because we stopped trying. Think about it. Do our primary and secondary schools teach liberty? Do our colleges require their students to take a course on liberty and grapple with the puzzle of liberty? Does any college in the “land of the free and the home of the brave” even offer a degree in liberty studies? The sad fact of the matter is that our ruling elites gave up on liberty a long time ago. For at least three generations now, Marxism has been far more popular in our classrooms than liberty. Nor has liberty fared well outside the classroom. Our most influential newsrooms, movie studios, boardrooms, pulpits, and courts are all steeped in Marxist values and rhetoric. Any American thus born after 1960 hasn’t been groomed to solve the puzzle of liberty. He has been groomed to be tribal, fearful, entitled, aggrieved, and financially weak—all the characteristics necessary to make him indifferent to the rights of others and very open to a thuggish government that rewards him with welfare and privilege.

So what to do?

Well, for starters, the answer is to start teaching liberty. And that’s a very convenient answer since it’s the only answer I have at my disposal. This book aims to be the civics book you should have been assigned in high school or college—your missing manual for liberty, if you will.

Now, before I begin my crash course on liberty, I want to tell you a little about myself. I’m a 63-year-old boomer dude who was born in Queens, New York, but mainly grew up in a quiet middle-class town on Long Island called Plainview. Early in 1980, soon after my second semester at Buffalo University had begun, I found myself rummaging through a fellow dorm dweller’s Playboy collection, and in that glossy gold mine of exposed flesh, I came across an issue from 1973 that featured an interview with Milton Friedman, a Nobel-prize winning economist who had recently flown across my radar. In the interview, Mr. Friedman’s book, Capitalism and Freedom, was referenced at least once, and since I liked what Mr. Friedman had to say, I went to my school’s library and borrowed its copy of Capitalism and Freedom. It was the first book since my middle school days that I read because I wanted to read it, not because some teacher told me I had to. It was also the first book that got me excited about something intellectual—the subject of liberty.

Thanks to Mr. Friedman—and Mr. Hefner, of course—I now had my life’s calling. I’ve been reading and thinking about liberty ever since I picked up that Playboy magazine on that fateful day in 1980. During the intervening 45 years, I mainly busied myself with humdrum employment—the most significant example being a 21-year stint at a rinky-dink highway department where I did everything from picking up roadkill and shoveling asphalt to inspecting concrete jobs and writing elementary computer code. I also busied myself with getting some formal credentials, the highest being a master’s degree in public administration. And I like to think my journey as an intellectual grunt has left me uniquely qualified to deliberate on liberty and the government our Founding Fathers created to achieve it. But that sentiment isn’t something I can easily defend and is more than likely the product of a fanciful mind. What I do know, however, is this: Your author, an unknown intellectual grunt from an equally unknown town on Long Island, has managed to do what the giants of liberty have flat out failed to do—solve the puzzle of liberty and finally give Americans the tools they need to make the just checking of freedom in this country a reality.

Okay, my friend, enough with the preliminaries. Let’s learn about liberty!

I hope you enjoyed the above excerpt. The Groovy Guide to Liberty will be available sometime this fall. I’ll keep you posted.