Defaulting on Freedom

No more running down the wrong road
Dancing to a different drum
Can't you see what's going on
Deep inside your heart?
--Michael McDonald

The founding thesis for this country is that all people were born to be free. As famously observed by Jefferson, this freedom is a self-evident truth that is operationalized through various unalienable rights--rights that are the property of each individual. The proper role of government, as Jefferson noted, is to secure those rights against abuse.

That those rights are subject to abuse is another self-evident truth. Humans constantly seek a more abundant life, and in their endless quest to satisfy their desires, people strive to get the most satisfaction per unit of effort spent. If people perceive an opportunity to satisfy their desires by putting forth less effort themselves while forcing others to labor on their behalf, then they will be tempted to do so.

Because the core competence of government is force, then people will gravitate toward political means to achieve their get-more-for-less objectives.

The temptation to abuse the freedoms of others via government force is so great that even those who drafted the Constitution could not resist the opportunity to infringe on the very liberties that they espoused to secure. Thus the Constitution was written in a manner that condoned slavery and tilted voting processes in favor of special interests.

Since then, we have been engaged in an epic struggle of hypocrisy--espousing liberty while consistently acting in ways that destroy it.

By definition, its self-evidence should make freedom 'obvious.' Oddly, however, even within the underlying document that specifies how government secures liberty, we have found it necessary to amend the Constitution to elaborate in more detail what freedom look like in practice. The first ten amendments (Bill of Rights), plus the 13th, 14th, 15th, 19th, 21st, 24th, and 26th amendments all make explicit individual rights that should have been 'obvious' from the outset.

Writing these freedoms down, it seems, closes the hypocritical divide a bit. But it does not eliminate the gap.

Borrowing from Martin Luther King, government consistently defaults on its guarantees that secure our unalienable right to freedom. This default is driven by that other self-evident truth: that, in their quest to satisfy self-interests at the expenditure of minimal effort, people are tempted to exert force on others.

As long as government force can be recruited to satisfy the interests of some at the expense of others, then our hypocrisy will persist.