Freedom is not Free

"You think you're free? You're not."
--Nathan 'Diamond Dog' Jones (Con Air)

To maintain freedom, individuals must allocate personal resources (time, money, attention, etc.) to protect their freedom against threats. Those allocations build two groups of defensive skills.

One group of skills is focused on detecting threats. For example, being aware of surroundings, studying history, consuming news media help people stay vigilant and aware of potential intrusions on their freedom.

The other group of skills is geared toward developing capability to ward off threats. Learning how to defend oneself, obtaining public office, and persuasion skills are among the varied talents that can neutralize actual or potential threats.

Because allocating scarce resources toward protecting freedom necessarily subtracts from resources that could have been allocated toward higher priority among freedom lovers--i.e., unhampered pursuit of personal interests--individuals will be tempted to skimp on self-defense skills. Instead, they might roll the dice and go for the increased reward associated with specialization (focused pursuit of personal interests) at the expense of increased risk (not having self-defense skills ready if threats actually materialize).

It is also possible that people might choose to outsource self-defense to someone else. This, of course, is supposed to be the primary role of government. There is some logic to this choice. Retaining agents who specialize in defense are likely better than those who do defense alongside other tasks.

However, there are problems with this outsourcing arrangement as well. Principals who hire agents to do their bidding are subject to the 'agency problem,' whereby agent goals differ significantly from the goals of the principals. It could be extremely tempting, for example, for strong armed government agents to use their muscle to shake down, rather than to protect, their principals. After all, the agents are the specialists with the guns.

It should be noted that the efficiencies gained by outsourcing to specialists in this case may be consumed in costs to monitor the hired guns for prospective mischief.

In the case of modern government, another problem is that government agents no longer specialize in protection. Because the scope of government has broadened considerably, state employees engage in myriad activities which could in fact diversify (i.e., de-specialized) them more so than the principals that hired them.

Some of these problems can be reduced by outsourcing protection to private, rather than public, organizations.

Nevertheless, because freedom is not free, individuals must grapple with how best to allocate resources toward defending that freedom before it is forcibly taken away.