America celebrates 222 years of independence this July 4th. Our current political polarization makes many question whether Americans are still united in freedom. I think freedom is still widely embraced, just two distinct visions.
The leaders of America’s founding generation studied lessons from political theory and history concerning lost freedom. They were rooted in English liberal political thought. Liberals sought freedom for the people against rule by kings, emperors, or pharaohs and had radically altered government in England and Holland.
Thomas Jefferson’s words in the Declaration of Independence encapsulated liberalism: “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights … That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” Liberalism’s foundation is the moral equality of all.
Slavery represented a glaring inconsistency in America’s experiment in freedom. Liberal principles were inconsistent with slavery; many 19th Century liberals were abolitionists. Throughout human history, monarchs ruled nations, and slavery was ubiquitous. Liberalism eventually ended monarchy and slavery, but change took time.
Liberty as freedom from being ruled by a king is straightforward. Divergence occurred with further theorizing about freedom. Is the necessity of work a type of repression, as reflected in Karl Marx’s “wage slavery”?
Economists think in terms of constraints on our choices, like a household’s budget constraint. Scarcity, the necessity of producing the goals and services we need and want with limited resources, produces constraints. Making the best choice given the constraints we face is the essential economic problem.
The divergent views of freedom can be interpreted as two types of constraints people face. Some constraints result from Nature and scarcity, the need to produce food, clothing, and shelter. Some constraints are placed on us by others, like kings, lords, and slave owners. Liberalism addressed human-imposed constraints and viewed freedom as freedom from interference by others.
A second vision of freedom addresses the constraints that Nature places on us through scarcity. Economic rights secured by the government provide people with sustenance for survival and liberate them from the necessity of working hundreds (or thousands) of hours each year in a dreary job.
The push for economic rights emerged after political rights and the market economy produced prosperity. A society at the subsistence level has no surplus production to redistribute. With the Great Enrichment and modern prosperity, many people produce more than they need to survive or live comfortably.
Proponents of the first approach view government efforts to provide economic rights as coercive. Healthcare or housing must be produced before being provided to anyone by right, and the government pays the cost. Taxpayers face forced labor until Tax Freedom Day to provide the economic rights of others.
Proponents of the second vision do not consider this coercive. Representative democracy ensures that citizens must give their deliberate consent to taxes and the welfare state. Taxation with representation is not the tyranny of a king’s armed men seizing your possessions.
We have two visions of freedom. One minimizes the constraints from other persons and regards Nature’s constraints as natural. The second balances the impositions from Nature and others. Conservatives and libertarians typically embrace the former, progressives the latter.
I think that most Americans still care very deeply about one of these visions of freedom. That the meaning of freedom has been elaborated over the last 250 years should surprise no one. Many great thinkers have explored freedom since Jefferson penned the Declaration.
Many people believe that freedom is worth fighting for; the accounts of George Washington and his army or Mel Gibson’s speech in Braveheart inspire many of us. Increasingly Americans on the right and left see themselves in an existential battle to defend their freedom. A battle between two groups of freedom fighters is sure to be ugly. We could perhaps ratchet down the acrimony by recognizing that we all value (different shades of) freedom.
Daniel Sutter is the Charles G. Koch Professor of Economics with the Manuel H. Johnson Center for Political Economy at Troy University and host of Econversations on TrojanVision. The opinions expressed in this column are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect the views of Troy University.
