« Libertarian Democrats, Revisited | Main | Fixing our Mistakes »

June 15, 2006

On Freedom

One of the problems with Libertarian Democrats, as pointed out by Enrak in the comments to an earlier post, is that libertarians and Democrats tend to have very different views on what freedom is. I can't help but remember a long (and utterly fruitless) debate I had with a commenter about the tension between freedom and security.

It is my position, and I suspect that of many libertarians, that freedom and security exist along a continuum. The more security a person has, the less free they are, because security has to be bought with freedom. For example, I have a house, which provides me with a great deal of security. However, keeping that security means I have to tie myself down to a particular place to live and that I have to find work capable of paying my mortgage. I can, of course, choose to move or take a job that pays less, but that freedom is now balanced by the knowledge that I will lose some security. As a wise woman once observed, freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose, and there is some truth in that. The difference between that kind of freedom and the kind Kos would like to impose are rather different, however.

It is true that the law against sleeping under bridges applies to rich and poor alike, but the poor are far more likely to be adversely affected by it. In other words, while everyone in America enjoys all the same freedoms on paper, some are better able to exercise those freedoms than others. And so, for some people, that means that they're not really free. Sure, they have the option to do other things, but because their options are poor, it renders them unfree. This assessment is not without merit. If you're poor and someone offers you money to do something distasteful, you're a lot more likely to do it than a financially secure person offered the same deal. While they are both free to accept or refuse the offer, the well-off person clearly is under less pressure to accept. And this pressure is viewed by some as enough to eliminate freedom.

The trouble with that thesis is that it renders freedom meaningless. Freedom presents us all with difficult decisions from time-to-time. The best among us make choices that come at great personal cost to them; that's really what heroism is all about. People who choose to endure great hardship or even death to do something that matters to them. Human history is replete with examples of people who knowingly choose a path that isn't in their best interests. If the poor really weren't free to choose because of their poverty, then these heroes could never have made their choices. Since they clearly were able to do so, the idea the poor aren't free is specious.

The real issue is that many people have only bad choices laid out in front of them. A single mother who has to choose between a demeaning job to support herself and her child, or the possibility of starving her baby while trying to survive on government assistance is free, but she's stuck with very unappealing uses of her freedom. (And yes, she made the choice to risk pregnancy, but there's a huge difference between a middle-class girl taking the risk and a lower-class girl making the same decision, as the former has a support structure behind her the latter lacks. Is this an argument for the poor to make better choices, because they risk more with bad decisions? Sure, but good luck putting that into practice. The sad fact is, the poor tend to be people most likely to make bad decisions.) When Democrats talk about her not being free, what I think they really mean is that she doesn't have any good choices, and it is therefore the duty of government to help provide her with better choices. One can agree or disagree with this philosophy, but I think making the argument in those terms would be somewhat more helpful to the debate.

Then again, it's a lot easier to win public support for programs that will ostensibly increase personal freedom than it is to win support for programs that will provide better choices for the worse-off among us. So it may be that conflating freedom with good options is a political tactic. In my experience, however, it seems that people who view positive freedoms as co-equal with negative freedoms honestly believe that their definition of freedom is the more accurate one.

Which is why it's so difficult to work across political lines like Democrat and libertarian. If you can't even agree on the basic definition of a word, it's very unlikely you'll be able to agree on anything more substantive.