I think you mean that the term is misused. The philosophical principle of liberty is extremely well defined. Unfortunately, it's also extremely misunderstood.



My opinions about this are very complex, and in some ways controversial, but I'll give it a shot.

We all know that there are different fields in which humans can develop. Someone who is really good at math might have very poor interpersonal skills. Or a great musician might not be able to do much of anything outside their specialty. The specialization of the modern world, resulting from the faster pace of change, aggravates this condition.

There is a ton of widely accepted evidence that human cognition progresses through developmental stages, as does human moral development. Kohlberg's moral stages are a classic explanation of how human moral "skill" or "development" progresses through stages.

When we are infants, we are completely dependent, helpless and self-centered. There is no other way we can be. Human psychological development is often thought of as a decrease in this self-centeredness, or narcissism. But since we all start out as infants, we all start out at square one.

Consider mathematical education. It builds in stages. There will *always* be more people who understand addition than there are those who understand multiplication, and there will *always* be more people who understand algebra than those who understand calculus. There has to be: all those who understand calculus must first understand algebra, but the opposite is not the case. Human development is like that.

Research shows that moral development progresses much the same. We start out as totally self-centered infants, and progress from completely selfish, to family-centric (kinship morality), to ethnocentric (nationalistic morality), and perhaps eventually to global-centric or world-centric morality. But these unfold in stages. There will *always* be more people at the lower levels, because everyone starts out at square one. We were all completely selfish when we were 2 years old.

The ideas of universal rights (liberty) are fairly high up that moral development, and there will always be more people who don't function at that level than those who do (this is the part that upsets the egalitarian left like Bitt). When you really look at a document like the Constitution, it is a document which, above all else, seeks to protect the system from the selfish levels of moral development. The goal of the Founders was to create a system that required people to behave at the moral level of universal rights, even if they didn't think that way themselves.

The principle of universal liberty is based on the notion that we are all fundamentally flawed, and it must be up to the individual to make important moral choices. The only restriction is that they don't intrude on others. We all get to pursue our own idea of the good life.

What's particularly interesting about this is that the system is designed to protect the minority opinion. The majority doesn't need any protection, because they can jam their laws through the system. The system is literally designed to protect the "whackos" (as Bitt calls guys like me), as long as we don't harm others.

Ultimately, though, the majority will destroy these protections. The Harrison Act was a big one, which paved the way to the Therapeutic State. So was the 16th amendment. There are thousands of other examples. As Hume said, "It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once."

I actually think it's too late for America. We're way too far down the path of collectivism. I ask myself why I bother, to be honest. I guess because it's an interesting conversation to me; I enjoy discussing ideas.

I also think that I might be able to get Bitt (or people like him) to admit that what they are fundamentally doing is using force to impose their *opinions* on me, and that Bitt is smart enough to realize that HIS OPINIONS MIGHT BE WRONG, no matter how fervently he believes them. The obvious logical conclusion, then, is that we need to figure out a way to pursue our own destinies in peace with each other. I might be wrong, too, but my position has the advantage that it allows me to be wrong without imposing my will on others with force.

We are very far away from this kind of thinking. People actually say things like "people have a RIGHT to healthcare." It's just a preposterous point of view. Imagine an island with 10 inhabitants and one doctor. The 9 non-doctors get together and have a vote which decides that the doctor has to treat all of their ailments for whatever they decide is a "fair" amount to pay him. In my view of the world, the doctor is completely in his rights to say, "go fuck yourself." What people refuse to acknowledge is that health care is a *service*, and as such it must be provided by other people (as do the artifacts of medicine like the machines and the medicines). Nobody has the RIGHT to the labor of others. That is called slavery. You have the right to your body, and your life, and to labor and to keep the fruits of your labor. You do not have the right to take the fruits of other people's labor, nor to force them to work for compensation that you unilaterally deem is "fair". Calling it by fancy names does not change the reality of what's going on here.


I think I've answered this above. It's not a "sudden" encroachment on liberty. It's just a particularly large one. In fact, it's not, in itself, that large. My concerns are that it opens the door for all kinds of central control in the name of "public health", just as our "war on terrorism" has.

You are wrong about one thing. People don't all want liberty, even in the abstract. Erich Fromm wrote a book about it called "Escape from Freedom". Sadly, most people operate at the selfish level of moral development (remember, it has to be this way, we were *all* at this level once). They don't want liberty (which implies radical self-responsibility), they want to be taken care of and protected from the risk of making a bad decision. Or, at best, they want liberty for themselves, but not for others. They may be free moral agents, but they reject that about themselves.

We had a good run.