The Nature of Freedom

Most Americans Have Lost the Sense of What Freedom is and What it Requires to Maintain it

Doug Audirsch | January 31, 2010

What is freedom?  Freedom is owning your life.  You own you and your work.  Work is a natural extension of who you are.  It costs you some of your life in time and effort to create your work, so it is tied inextricably to who you are.  If anyone else can lay claim to you, or your work, without your agreement, then you are a slave.  The founding fathers of America declared in the Declaration and Resolves of 1774, that everyone is entitled to “Life, Liberty and Property”.  Property is the work of your hands.  The Declaration of Independence recognized “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”.  The “pursuit of happiness” is the practical equivalent of “property”.  Whatever a person decides to pursue in their life is the product of their efforts.  Therefore, your pursuit is your work which results in your property.  Freedom, therefore, is the ability to own your life and your property.

All government is force.  It offers only two options to its subjects:  unquestioning compliance or violent retribution.  Its very essence is coercive.  Therefore, the bigger the government is allowed to be, the fewer freedoms we retain.  George Washington said, “Government is not reason; it is not eloquence; it is force!  Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.”  The goal and purpose of government is control.  The greater the control, the less freedom citizens have.

Government is not evil. It is simply a system; a system of control that is used by autocrats to control as many people as possible.  If you happen to agree with the decisions made by them it can be a seemingly pleasant experience.  If not, then it can be quite negative.  Control is the opposite of freedom.  Through control one person, or group of people, exercise power over another person, or group of people.  This coercive exercise is known as government.  The individuals under control have no choice in this arrangement.  They must submit absolutely or face violent consequences.  Control backed by power is tyranny.

Power is a corruptive force.  Once tasted, more is craved.  Like an addiction, the more one has the more one needs it.  The need is never filled.  Like a fire it never runs out of a need for fuel.  This reality is the motivation to make government as small as possible.  When you have a fire in your home for heating and cooking you keep that fire as small as possible while still useful and contained at all cost.  The slightest spark out of place is quickly extinguished to prevent a disaster.  America’s house is on fire.  We must extinguish the flames in order to save the house.

Because government is control backed with power, it will never voluntarily diminish.  The only real way to force government to shrink is through power.  Control without power is useless.  You cannot control anything over which you have no power.  The natural arc of human nature is defined by entropy.  The 2nd law of thermodynamics illuminates the tendency of systems to move from order to disorder.  Systems, by their very nature become more complex, and less efficient over time.  As the human body breaks down over time and eventually ceases functioning, so do human governments.  They move from a state of logical and clear arrangement to one of disarray.  America enshrined the ideals of liberty.  The founders of this nation recognized the God-given rights of a person over their own life, liberty and property.  Over the past 230+ years, the system they designed to last 100 years has become complex, disordered and tyrannical.  Our current government is far more oppressive than even King George was to the Colonialists.  Without understanding the true nature of freedom, we are destined to be subjects not citizens.