Liberty

Liberty - it's ingrained in every child of America as an ideal not to be reached, but already acquired by the people of America.  The story of our country's independence is almost mythical now, a story of gods on earth fighting for a transcendental ideal. 

But what does liberty actually mean?

Even among the party ostensibly of liberty - the Libertarian Party - the definition sways wildly.  Almost no one agrees that people should be free to do anything they want.  At the very least, people shouldn't be free to commit murder, for instance.  We can pretty much all agree that murder and child rape are too far to take the liberty argument, but many would take it right up to that edge.  (And for those few who would take it that far, they say that we should be able to defend our lives and the lives and welfare of our children, or we didn't deserve them in the first place.)

Case in point - the current spate of Republicans who are earning Libertarian votes for their votes on education.  One of the common themes in the Libertarian Party is the destruction of public education.  They see giving tax money back to the people and letting the people spend it on education as they choose as "Liberty" - that is, you now have the freedom to get your child educated by whatever organization you see fit, and, if you prefer to homeschool, you have that extra funding to pay for educational supplies.  It's a win for everyone with the money to afford it, and a major loss for poor people (who, many of these Libertarians argue, don't deserve it anyway).  The official party line is that the destruction of public education would give poor people who work hard to send their children to school a greater incentive to make sure that child succeeds, and remove from the school children who don't want to be there.

This desire to completely eliminate governmental structures is truly ultimate freedom - but only for the subset of people who can independently afford to pay for the things that government previously provided.  For the rest, it greatly reduces liberty, reducing the ability for people of lower incomes to rise to higher incomes.

Image from the Economic Policy Institute

In the image above, lower numbers correlate with greater income mobility - that is, people in Denmark are far more likely to earn more than their parents than people in Slovenia.

If we want to talk about freedom, then we need to talk about it in terms of freedom to pursue dreams, to rise up out of poverty, to change your life no matter who you are.  In the U.S. - a nation notably more driven by the idea of "free market" than the countries listed below it on the above image - it's actually harder to do that, rather than less hard.

And this makes sense with even a little investigation.  When you have to work yourself to death to provide an education for your children, you're not also able to provide them with secure housing, food, clothing, and other basic necessities, as explained by Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs:

From Boundless.com

To be able to learn, a child needs the immediate physiological things on the list (barring sex, which doesn't start being a driving need until later in life) - food, water, sleep, etc.  He or she also needs those things listed in the safety column, as safety can create such a driving fear that it blocks out the ability to learn (found in the Esteem category).  When you're going to bed every night wondering if you or your family are going to be shot in your sleep, or worrying about the cockroaches crawling over your body, or worrying about your mom's untreated heart condition, you're not going to be able to sleep.  And that will make you less productive at school, if you can even pay attention there while these issues are eating away at your mind.

Instead, true freedom occurs when these two tiers are secure, when you're free to pursue love and belonging, confidence and achievement, and so on.  Then, all people are free to live as they choose, to pursue their dreams, to be amazing, to rise above their circumstances.