From the Foundation For Economic Education [My added comments in brackets]:
- Liberty is precious, rare, never guaranteed, and always threatened. It can be lost in a single generation if it’s not advanced and defended. [Everyday you can find stories in any newspaper of some proposal to restrict liberty; lawmakers are constantly trying to assert more state power over our lives. One glaring example is the McCain-Feingold Campaign Finance Law. See, Thank Citizens United you can see “13 hours” this weekend.]
- Liberty follows from human nature: We are unique individuals, not a blob or an army of robots to be programmed by those with power. [High office is sought by people who want to control others, requiring those who value their independence to be constantly on guard.]
- To be fully human, all of us must be free to exercise our choices and govern our lives so long as we permit the same of others. [That’s what Abraham Maslow called “Self Actualization,” the highest attainment of our innate human needs.]
- Liberty works. Over and over again, it produces a degree of interpersonal cooperation, innovation, and wealth creation that allows human beings to flourish — nothing else even comes close. [It works because it allows us to make our own decisions about how, when and with whom we will collaborate for our mutual benefit]
- Liberty is the only social, political, or economic arrangement that requires that we live to high standards of conduct and character and rewards us when we do so. This is a crucial difference between liberty and the soul-crushing, paternalistic snares that are offered as alternatives. [Once government introduces the notion that some people are “entitled” to other people’s money comity, charity and cooperation are lost to be replaced by greed, anger and estrangement]
- Life without liberty is unthinkable. Who wants to live at the end of another’s leash, fearing at every turn what those armed with force and power might do to us, even if they have good intentions? [C.S. Lewis said: “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”]
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