One of the most integral ideals of United States history is freedom and equality. What I’ve noticed, is that the aforementioned ideals are the most lauded, overrepresented, accentuated but contradictorily misunderstood principles in this country.
The definition of freedom is the power or right to act, think, and speak according to one’s prerogatives; as long as one’s freedom doesn’t interfere or stifle the freedom of another citizen.
Contradictorily, with the pervasion of propaganda from leftists and “rightists”, many Americans have been under the delusion that freedom is a synonymy of fairness!
Just because there’s a socio-economic stratification system, where some people are compensated more than others, or some people inherited more wealth than others (due to genealogical accomplishments of one’s antecedents), does not mean that the privileged should be villainized for it.
An example of this is the controversy that revolves around the topic of universal health care, or the Affordable Care Act (which in actuality is unaffordable).
It is not the government’s job to violate the property rights of hospital owners, health care providers, medical scientists, ambulance services, or other occupational participants of the health care sector just to make their prices “affordable.”
Because, in actuality (and ironically) “affordability” is expensive and intrusive!!
People who subscribe to libertarian ideology can agree that health care, food and drugs, energy, housing, and other industries should be left to the free market. It is through the spontaneity of order, the proliferation of competition, demand elasticities, and other contributive economic factors, that health care, housing, food, and drugs would be much more affordable and accessible for people on all levels of the stratification system.
It is the consumers right to have the freedom to determine what’s demandable, affordable, and usable. It is then up to the producers to respond to the preferences of the consumer: if they don’t, instead of being criminalized by the government for not following regulations (in the name of “fairness”), they’ll get punished by the consumer through deficits, bankruptcy, or insolvency.
People need to come to the realization that neither the world, nor nature is fair, they never will be; even if there were, hypothetically, a communist hegemony that ruled the world! Because, when you have the tyranny of the majority (something often misclassified as freedom), then the property rights of the minority are violated, which leads to mass deprivations of freedom.
We can look at the 56-62 million casualties in the USSR between 1928-1954; or the estimated 1.5 million casualties of the Cultural Revolution between 1966 to 1976; the 6 million Jews who were killed under the National Socialist party in Germany between 1933-1945; the regime of Khmer Rouge in Cambodia from 1975-1979 that caused the execution of 200,000 people, with the inclusion of mass starvation and disease for millions of others.
Additionally, we can look at the country of Ghana which had the same per capita income as South Korea in 1957($200); however, 50 years later, Ghana’s per capita only increased to $420, while South Korea’s exponentially increased to $12,200!!
The difference between Ghana and South Korea was that even though both countries had histories of dictatorships, governmental regulations and interference into the economy (in the name of fairness and socialism) stifled the potential growth of Ghana, a country that is opulent in natural resources when compared to South Korea.
The focus on fairness, instead of a true understanding of freedom, during the civil rights movement is what is causing a lot of the criminality and glorification of “ghetto culture” in primarily African or black communities throughout the United States and the United Kingdom.
The policies of Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and Franklin Roosevelt (like the Housing Act of 1937 which created public housing developments throughout the United States), catalyzed the various rent control laws we see in different cities throughout the country.
History has proven that when government interferes in the housing sector, it alleviates the incentive to renovate the properties to keep living conditions comfortable for tenants. This causes dilapidated properties and neighborhoods of angry tenants who take their acrimony out on one another and inflict intra-group violence; this adds to the creation of “danger zones.”
Between 1995 and 2008, two hundred-thousand public housing units were demolished in the United States. This was a waste of tax dollars, all in the name of fairness.
The costs of meeting the maintenance needs of public housing is $22 billion, according to The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities; This is very expensive considering the exorbitant $20 trillion deficit the United States currently holds as well as the inundation of criminality in these government funded establishments.
The billions of dollars spent in the name of fairness is actually a violation of the freedom of American citizens.
The living conditions in these public houses are depriving the tenants of freedom and fairness – in the name of “freedom” and “fairness.”
There are multiple examples that can be utilized to prove that freedom and fairness are not synonymous, and that the only way that there can be fairness is for people to have the freedom to pursue opportunities – as long as no one else’s freedoms are violated.
Baruti Libre
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nice write up Baruti. https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/7695d36d2bff89a9a15cc5daa6481925c3cbc022cf49ce9e505e049aeae35cd6.jpg
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