Freedom in Society, Part 4

I conclude this four-part series with a reminder of the reason government exists. In Western thought it is part of a social contract whereby the citizens institute an authority with the mandate to protect their natural rights, those of life, liberty and property, or their pursuit of happiness, if you prefer, in the Jeffersonian expression and extension of the third natural right. It is a compact in which the peace-loving and law-abiding seek security against the predatory and destructive.

We have seen that there are frequently tradeoffs to be made when conflicting liberties collide. It has long been recognized, for instance, that freedom of speech does not include the right to incite deadly panic and that property rights no longer confer an "owner" with the right to bind fellow human beings to unpaid service and deprive them of their liberty. One's freedoms become limited when they begin to detract from those of others.

The level of essential protection and necessary restraint is in the eye of the beholder. These are often questions to be determined by the political process. In the times of the Robber Barons of the late nineteenth century, for instance, a laissez-faire understanding of freedom meant that the strong and powerful had license to employ and house workers under appallingly unsafe and unsanitary conditions and to keep them in such penury that many felt forced to risk sending their young children into mines and factories to earn a few extra pennies a day. The rise of the Populist and Progressive movements, however, led to the adoption of child labor laws, building codes and the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906. The "right" of the bosses to cruelly use their laborers and tenants and bilk consumers ran into the countervailing rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness of their victims.

So it is today. We see extremists who hold that their right to property means the government has no authority to tax them. Others maintain they have a right to bring loaded firearms to political events. Others yet contend that while a national program to defend citizens' health and lives against foreign enemies is warranted a national program to defend citizens' health and lives against disease and infirmity is impermissible. And there are those who say that rights to things like fair trials with evidence must be dispensed with in certain cases to be determined by them.

These arguments are not new; there have been such since the early days of the republic. The boundaries have always been a bit fuzzy, and the voices of the extreme and the self-serving have usually been the loudest and always the better funded. Yet over time the advocates of decency have advanced nonetheless. As Dr. King put it, "The moral arc of the universe is long but it bends toward justice."

Freedom does not mean the right of the cruel and unscrupulous to take advantage of the honest and innocent. Quite the contrary, it means the right of the latter to defend themselves against the former.