In the U.S.A. there is a great travesty taking place within our thinking and within our expressions. That is the conflation of “liberty” with “freedom”. They are not the same and they were not when the Founding Fathers of the United States fought for the blessings of liberty. Not freedom, liberty.
Liberty is the freedom from oppressive restrictions upon one’s way of life. This in no way states nor implies the freedom to do whatever one wants to do. Oppression is the unjust infliction of hardship and constraint upon a subordinate group.
Some freedoms, including unbridled freedom in the marketplace, are what enable some to acquire an inordinate amount of wealth and power which then enables them to oppress others.
In order to preserve our liberty, We the People must predominantly agree our liberty is a precious thing to be preserved. If any subgroup decides otherwise and acquires the means to subvert the value of liberty within our culture, they have declared a de facto war upon the values that the United States was founded upon. They have set upon overturning our nation, our culture, and our lives.
It’s not that capitalism is inherently bad. It’s that the men and women practicing it must recognize the implicit social compact necessary to preserve our essential liberty: they should not take too much. They should not “drain the economic well”. This is important to ensure that the average citizens of the U.S. do not become impoverished and economically enslaved. But impoverishment and economic slavery is happening pervasively in the U.S.A. and elsewhere in the world.
Sacrificing the American peoples’ hard-won liberty for the freedom of unbridled predatory capitalism is a travesty and a grievous insult to all of the men and women who have worked and fought to establish and preserve liberty for us and future generations.
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