Freedom, liberty, democracy… these words are used so often that we give them little real thought, rarely holding them up to the realities of what we see around us. What do these words really mean? Do they currently exist for us to celebrate as we appear to think they do? And if not, is there anything we can do about it?

Let’s take a closer look.

Photo by Jason Llagan — Flickr

Freedom

Simply put, freedom is the idea that we’re free to do as we wish to do. However, there’s more to it than this. In practice it has a caveat, as we are all surrounded by each other and not in a vacuum; freedom is more realistically defined in a social context as the idea that we’re each free to do as we wish to do, so long as we don’t prevent others from having the same ability. We may wish to be free to hurt someone, but that would limit their freedom to continue free of hurt, and if considered acceptable, would open the door to people hurting us. And so freedom in practice has its one condition – it exists for us all only to the social degree that everyone else has equal freedom themselves.

However, in addition to this sole condition, freedom can also be thought of in two different ways. On the one hand, there is the freedom from being prevented from doing what you want to do by others. And on the other hand, there is the freedom to actually do what you want to do. The former can be thought of as a lack of binding constraints (negative freedom) and the latter an abundance of real opportunity (positive freedom). Which version of freedom is most important is entirely up to the individual, but referring again to freedom’s one condition, both forms must be available to everyone universally, lest one’s freedom be partial.

So how can we universally realize freedom in both forms? What is it that freedom requires?

“The way we can best take care of ourselves is to have land, and turn it and till it by our own labor.”

Opportunity

Thomas Jefferson contemplated the answer to this question and wrote his solution into his version of the Virginia State Constitution:

“Every person of full age neither owning nor having owned 50 acres of land, shall be entitled to an appropriation of 50 acres or to so much as shall make up what he owns or has owned 50 acres in full and absolute dominion. And no other person shall be capable of taking an appropriation.”

Jefferson felt that to realize freedom more fully, everyone needed to have a minimum amount of land, and this ownership of land would release every individual from the coercive power of others, while also empowering them to actually do what they wish. With this universally guaranteed minimum amount of capital in the form of real property, people could choose to live on their own, off their own land with their own labor, bothered by no one. In addition they could also choose to use that land as a source of income, through their own labor, to actually afford the goods and services of others. In this way Jefferson saw a minimum of 50 acres as a guarantee of both forms of freedom.

Decades later, a freed slave and chosen spokesperson of other freed slaves named Garrison Frazier would express the same sentiment as his own answer, when asked about slavery and how to best preserve his and his community of freedmen’s newly proclaimed freedom from it.

“Slavery is, receiving by irresistible power the work of another man, and not by his consent. The freedom, as I understand it, promised by the proclamation, is taking us from under the yoke of bondage, and placing us where we could reap the fruit of our own labor, take care of ourselves and assist the Government in maintaining our freedom… The way we can best take care of ourselves is to have land, and turn it and till it by our own labor...”

The result of this response, is the now infamous Special Field Order No. 15 by General Sherman, which included a promise which came to be known as “40 acres and a mule”, where 400,000 acres of land owned by slave owners were to be redistributed to the now former slaves themselves, in 40 acre increments. It was the freed men themselves who knew that to be truly free required more than a lack of chains, but real opportunity and the power to say “No” to being forced to work for others, that land ownership could provide. Essentially, a minimum amount of capital was required for them to be entirely and forever free from slavery.

Unfortunately, this promise was broken only months later by President Andrew Johnson, and the land returned to its former owners. How would history be different, if this order had not been reversed? Where would we be now if this same order had been extended to all U.S. citizens? Without this bare minimum of real property, does everyone in America today somehow have the equivalent freedom from coercion plus freedom of opportunity such minimum land wealth ownership would allow?

If not, what about liberty?

Photo by jirotrom — Flickr

Liberty

One of the more complete and lesser known explanations of liberty can be found in the late 19th century writings of John Milton Bonham in his book “Industrial Liberty” as a passage from Liberty herself:

“You shall be equal to all others before my law; not equal in faculty or endowment, for my gift to you is of political right, not of natural faculty. Political freedom does not, and cannot, confer natural faculty nor can it change the variety of that faculty. I take you as I find you, with those faculties which nature has thus given you in diversity. I would not change these if I could ; nor would I disturb their diversity; since it is by this very diversity that individuality receives its highest expression, and that the largest results of my gift of political freedom and political equality are realized. Bringing, therefore, to me the faculties which nature has given you, I determine that you shall employ them in your own behalf, in my behalf, and behalf of humanity, with the same freedom as that with which every other man may use his. You may bequeath the fruits of your endeavors, within the limits of your natural affection, to your children and grandchildren. This you may do in order that your incentives to acquisition and possession may be complete. Beyond this you cannot tie up your gains to be held against the incentives and activities of the generations to follow.”

Here we have Bonham as Liberty notifying the reader that it is impossible for everyone to be absolutely equal, that there will always be inequality, but we are all equally guaranteed the same rights before the law, and that we must use our liberty for the liberty of all and always keep in mind that it is possible to go too far — that at some point we end up taking from each other, even long after our own deaths. And so Liberty continues on with again, a sole caveat…

“I confer this gift upon you, upon the condition that you will assist every other unit in the exercise of his like political gift, and that you will not permit any person or combination of persons to exceed the common limit… You may, for the common convenience, permit commerce and industry to be conducted by delegated units; but you must see to it that paramount to all such authority is the supreme equal political right of the individual units, the sacred thing to which all other things must be adjusted…”

So, just as freedom exists within social and economic bounds, so does liberty. The achievement of real liberty requires that each individually ensure that all collectively keep and maintain one another’s equal political and economic rights. This is the cost of liberty — that each individual not accumulate so much money or political power, that the ability of others to accumulate their own is reduced or even outright prevented. Though there will always be those with more money, it cannot be allowed to reach a point whereas it reduces the economic liberty of others. And though there will always be those with more potential political power, absolute equality in this regard must be held as paramount.

So how can we universally realize liberty? What is it that we need?

There can be no liberty if we do not each contribute as is necessary to achieve it and guard it for everyone — excluding no one.

Taxes

Now come to be known as almost derogatory in nature, taxation is actually the very infrastructure of the more grounded idea of liberty John M. Bonham defined as industrial liberty in 1888:

“Industrial liberty consists in the freedom of each individual citizen, guarded by such delegated authority, contributed by each, as is necessary to preserve this individual freedom equally to each…”

In other words, there can be no liberty if we do not each contribute as is necessary to achieve it and guard it for everyone — excluding no one.

This idea of industrial liberty recognized how liberty in practice had been affected by the Industrial Age. Where once we were all a bunch of farmers, industrialization allowed all of that to change through advances in technology. These advances, although great in allowing us to do more with less with ever increasing productivity, served to centralize power via corporations to the point of creating monopolies and concentrating great wealth. This was already seen a century ago as problematic.

A century later, information technology is only further accelerating the concentration of wealth. Where once a corporation required 100,000 employees to create $1 billion in value, we now find companies like WhatsApp being valued at $19 billion with 55 employees. At the same time we see a continually shrinking labor force participation rate. This increasing concentration of wealth at the top and decreasing ability to earn income at the bottom poses a problem to the idea of liberty, because those with the most money have the most liberty, and those with the least money don’t have enough to realize any actual liberty. Taxation becomes even more important as a means of correcting this structural imbalance.

As an economic system that creates and concentrates wealth, capitalism increasingly concentrates more and more wealth in the hands of those who already have it. Thomas Piketty has confirmed this through centuries of evidence and its thorough analysis in his Capital in the Twenty-First Century, making clear that capitalism is a system that requires some form of sufficient redistribution in order to avoid a new form of feudalism. Simply put as the equation “r > g”, wealth will not trickle down faster than wealth builds more wealth. Only through the use of taxation can money unceasingly concentrating at the top be cycled back into the system as a whole to keep the entire system from being torn apart by larger factors like the drying up of consumption and inevitable social unrest.

When liberty exists unequally, accruing mostly at the top along with most of the wealth and income, while disappearing everywhere else, and a sufficiently progressive system of taxation does not exist to help correct for this imbalance, where does this leave the particular system of government we claim to hold most dear?