Liberty vs. Freedom by Chuck McGlawn

 December 24, 2011 Edited 3/18/2019 Edited 3/10/2020

The speech/article that follows is titled Liberty vs. Freedom. You may be asking yourself where he is going with this. Well, let me tell you. I see Liberty and Freedom as very different. Let me list some of the subtle distinctions

Freedom is created. It is likened to an invention of something like the telephone or the automobile. Liberty, on the other hand, is discovered. It is likened to a discovery like the discovery of gravity or the discovery of electricity, or the discovery that we, the Earth is not the center of the universe. Freedom must be constructed, as with the written Constitution, or years of tradition. Liberty is described, like with the Declaration of Independence, or Thomas Paine’s Common Sense,  or Lock’s Second Treatise on Government or especially Galileo’s discovery that the Earth revolves around the sun and not the reverse. Liberty is the default position when you do not have the government telling you what you can or cannot do.

When I got to this point in my writing, I had more to say, of course, however, I thought I should Google the subject. Of the many hits I got, three articles at least touched on the concepts on which I was expanding.

Paul V. Hartman in "Freedom" and "Liberty" Are Not the Same Thing” touched on what I am saying when he wrote, “Freedoms end when they encounter contrary freedoms of another person. You are free to smoke until you encounter my freedom not to inhale your smoke. Liberty lacks that distinction: my liberty never contradicts or limits yours. In other words, freedoms have boundaries, because they are active or positive. Liberty does not because they are passive and negative.”

Geoffrey Nunberg put a historical spin on the subject, and in the process, he suggests that Liberty is of a higher order than Freedom. In the Nation article Freedom vs. Liberty; More Than Just Another Word for Nothing Left to Lose Published: March 23, 2003, wrote, “For the founders of the nation, liberty was the fundamental American value.” Nunberg added, Echoing John Locke, the Declaration of Independence speaks of ''life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.'' The text doesn't mention freedom at all. It was liberty that Patrick Henry declared himself willing to die for, and liberty that the ringing bell in Philadelphia proclaimed on July 8, 1776.

Liberty remained the dominant patriotic theme for the following 150 years, even if freedom played an important role, particularly in the debates over slavery. Lincoln's Gettysburg Address began by invoking a nation ''conceived in liberty,'' but went on to resolve that it should have a ''new birth of freedom.''
Never the less, in early 1870, just five years or so after the (so-called) Civil War, France began the construction of the Statue of Liberty.
That makes me ask did Lincoln have some insights into the differences before anyone began writing about it. Additionally, Nunberg observed, “But ''freedom'' didn't really come into its own until the New Deal period, when the defining American values were augmented to include the economic and social justice that permitted people free development as human beings. Of Roosevelt's Four Freedoms -- of speech, of religion, from want and from fear -- only the first two might have been expressed using ''liberty.'
The civil rights movement invoked the rallying cry ''freedom now”'. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. used ''freedom'' 19 times in his ''I Have a Dream'' speech, and liberty only twice. Feminists extended freedom to cover reproductive rights, while Timothy Leary spoke of the ''fifth freedom . . . the freedom to expand your own consciousness.''

More recently in The Calling of Cultural Liberty · Thursday, November 06, 2008, by Crosbie Fitch

We may express a desire to have the freedom to park our car on our neighbor’s drive, but the mere citing of aspiration of ‘freedom’ cannot invoke a right, as if that invocation could then trump our neighbor’s natural right to privacy.

Then in three profound statements, he rendered almost useless the need for me to continue. What he said was,

Freedom is a lack of constraint. It is neither intrinsically noble nor inherently ethical.

Ethical freedom is a lack of unethical constraint, and is more succinctly termed ‘liberty’.

We do not have a right to freedom. We have a right to liberty – freedom constrained only by the equal rights of others.

Freedom is subjective. That is why the freedom movement is always splintered, by disagreement and constant infighting over the boundaries and what is to be included. Liberty is objective. Everyone knows what it is, and if not, a one-sentence description and on goes the light. If Liberty were the goal, then the only plank that the National Libertarian Party Platform would require is something like, “We oppose all actions requiring the use of use of force by the DC Government that an individual does not have the power to do.”  This concept arises from the Declaration of Independence; which states, “Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” If the DC Government gets its power from the governed, it would naturally follow the DC Government would not have any power that an individual as an individual, does not have. It also follows that man cannot create a Government in Washington DC and consent or delegate to that government powers that man himself does not have. Let me say that again. If the Government in Washington DC gets its power from the governed, then the DC Government cannot have powers that individual man does not have.

A question or two are in order here to clear up the concept; Does an individual man[or do you] have the right to defend his own life and property? YES is the answer. Therefore, man can institute a Government in Washington DC and share with that DC Government the power to protect life and property. In fact, the ability to share these powers is the justification for a military and a judicial system.

Now, [and please listen to this carefully.] do you as an individual, have the right to take money from others and give that money to someone else that you think needs it more? The answer is NO. Therefore, it would follow that if man does not have the right to do it as an individual, then he cannot create a Government in Washington DC, and consent to or delegate to that DC Government the power to take money from others and give it to someone else that the Government thinks needs it more.

This means our DC Government can have no power to extract taxes from anyone to educate children. Our DC Government cannot be empowered to educate children, no matter how badly the population may think children need education. It means that our DC Government can have no power to extract taxes from anyone to fund social welfare, no matter how needy the population may think some people are. It also can have no power for health care providing, business promoting, Park building. The National Government should not be involved in educational standards setting, régime changing, weather reporting, or democracy spreading. The DC Government should not be spending tax monies on database keeping, farmer saving, speed limit setting or toilet designing. No matter how large a budget surplus our government may have it should never spend taxes on E-Mail reading, phone tapping, corporate bailouts, or the dozens of other things that the DC Government is either financing or regulating.

This concept is described by Jeffery Rosen President of the National Constitution Center as “Promised in the Declaration of Independence, implicit in the Constitution and codified in the Bill of Rights.”

In my view, freedom is a positive thing. It must be constructed and once it is constructed it has boundaries. Liberty is a negative thing. It is just there, and it has always been there waiting to be discovered. It does not require construction and has no boundaries. The boundaries of Freedom have been constructed by very smart people to be sure. And its goal and boundaries are worthy. Freedom is deemed worthy and valuable by additional smart people. The distinction that sets freedom apart from liberty is that freedom has subjective rules and liberty has unchangeable objective law.

Freedom has goals it wants to progress and improvement. Its advocates think and want more for next year and even more for the year after. And it wants to broaden its base, by instilling the quest for Freedom into more people, then more people. Liberty is passive, but it allows limitless growth and improvement, for a limitless number of people, and it does this by just being there.

Paraphrasing Fitch from above we have a right to liberty, and liberty is freedom constrained only by the equal rights of others” reminds me of the oft-times admonition that we can have liberty only if we are willing to share it with everyone. And correct me if I am wrong, but is that not just another way of saying, no one has the right to initiate force on another.