Former Freespace guest blogger Chris Atkins asks how one calculates whether Americans are freer now than a century ago. He says my first response would be to say no, we are not freer than we were 100 years ago. Sure, in some people’s mind, we are more free because homosexuals can ‘marry’ and because women can kill their own children. Granting for the purposes of argument that these kinds of things count for an increase in freedom, what about the increase in the tax burden? The growth of government? The continuing decline in the value of our money? I just find it hard to believe that we are really more free now than we were 100 years ago, but I don’t know the calculus the panel used to derive their estimate.
First, Mr. Atkins needs to be corrected: women are not now and never have been free to kill children. He is, rather, using loaded language to substitute for a reasonable argument which might establish that a single-celled organism without a mind has a right to life, something I long ago challenged him to deliver, and which he never has delivered.
Anyway, as for the calculus, there is of course no such thing. Americans are freer in many ways, and less free in many ways. In 1904, a person could, more or less, set up a business in a day, work for his wages and keep them, set his own hours, work his way up the ladder and become a millionaire. Assuming, of course, he was not black. Or a woman. Or Chinese. These are quite large assumptions. The great majority of people today would be, if they were dropped into the world of a century ago, incalculably less free. And yes, during the panel, the issue of homosexuality was mentioned. It’s true—homosexuals today have much greater freedom from arbitrary, unconscionable government interference than they did in the past. If Mr. Atkins considers that a negative, this is revealing as to his principles.
The greatest increase in freedom comes through technological advancement. Sunday morning I woke up in Las Vegas, Nevada, a miserable, godforsaken desert, with practically no natural resources that are not rocks. I nevertheless awoke in calm air-conditioned comfort, ate a large buffet breakfast which included salmon, chicken, shrimp, and various other things not native to Nevada. I then got on an airplane and flew home, got in a car, came home, and blogged about my trip. On the way I listened to the music of Stevie Ray Vaughan, on a compact disk—music created on an electric guitar. Almost nothing that I did—almost nothing that I dealt with, from my cheap, faux leather shoes to the instantaneous news I got on the radio at the top of the hour, was available to people in 1904. My freedom is therefore infinitely greater.
But of course, today I’m subject to zoning laws, income taxes, licensing restrictions, minimum wages, medicine regulation, and a limitless number of curtailments to my freedom which did not exist in 1904.
On the other hand—and this is the point I made during the panel—most of the deprivations of our freedom are fairly traceable to the actions of the Progressives who were marching to their peak in 1904. The deprivation of our freedom is in large part due to the legal profession’s adoption of the doctrines of Oliver Wendell Holmes, who wrote his atrocious Lochner dissent almost a century ago. It was the things going on in 1904 that led to the military draft, forced sterilization, curtailments of free speech, and so forth.
The panel pretty much agreed, therefore, that if we measure freedom by the capacity to act on one’s desires, we are vastly freer, due to the technological progress made possible by capitalism—but that in many ways we are much less free, due, I think, to the Progressive age.
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