Many people don’t understand the significance and meaning of freedom because they have been socially conditioned and hopelessly inured to defend the idea of authoritarianism. Discoursing with them about the rational calculation of freedom is like playing chess with a pigeon. No offence intended.
They believe that freedom doesn’t work because it is an utopian concept. For them, freedom is an ideology because they’re eleutherophobic.
Well, I would like to stop bashing their ignorance because symbol-minds don’t matter.
“Freedom” can coexist only with the principles of voluntaryism, social cooperation and peaceful association. Freedom – as a natural phenomena – cannot process or function with the matrix of authoritarianism, force, expropriation and structural violence. The freedom – under the surveillance of state – is a lie, delusion and demagogy. Just because majority of us/people believe that “freedom comes from the top” doesn’t mean they’re factually right. It is not about the size of constitutional audience. It is about the coherence of beliefs. On the other end, the idea of authoritarianism is an indoctrinated belief and dogma. The root cause of economic interventions is the mistaken belief that government can improve our lives by making economic decisions for us. Voluntary cooperation in the marketplace, on the other hand, requires only access to an honest criminal justice system to enforce contracts and protect property rights.
Government mandates require government coercion for their enforcement, including, for example, the mandate that everyone contribute to the government’s Social Security and Medicare programs. Although the public requires no government mandate to buy any of the wide ranging retirement savings and health insurance products available on the free market, government must force us to participate in its Social Security and Medicare schemes.
Absent the mandates, few would participate, because many understand that these programs are fatally flawed transfer taxes — Ponzi schemes of sorts — posing as retirement savings and healthcare plans. There are no real profit-producing assets from which to pay the plans’ distributions, merely the promise by government that it will continue to force others to pay you in the future as it forces you to pay others in the present.
These programs must be maintained by the police power of the state, and what may appear to be widespread acceptance of the Social Security and Medicare mandates is really the vociferous support of those receiving benefits. Meanwhile, the taxpayers who understand the reality of the program continue to pay to stay out of jail. Thus, in my view, we don’t have “freedom” of opportunity.
Freedom is not a paper which can be legislated by the parasitical producers who are incapable to produce a toothpick. The more government meddles in the economic sphere — which should require no regulation at all, since it is completely voluntary — the more police power is necessary to force us to comply. All government agencies possess huge enforcement mechanisms that not only can confiscate our property but take away our freedom. Freedom is a maxim and it is the spontaneous order of our nature, in my view.
Concluding remarks
Freedom is simply not about posing for selfies and “feeling free”. In fact, it is ultracrepidarianism to believe so. In my view, freedom is an essential facet in our economic actions and social interactions. The essential foundation of our civilization isn’t taxation. It is liberty.
Freedom is also not a metaphysical concept. We cannot be free from our wants or desires. As a libertarian, I propose to review the means because “means justify the ends” and not vice-versa. Voluntary cooperation between all individuals debauches the status of force. Voluntaryism is, therefore, an aesthetic means to all our individual ends.
Freedom doesn’t guarantee the absence of perilous-ness but its presence vouches [the] functional competitiveness of voluntary exchanges, according to me.
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