Giving Up Freedom to Protect Freedom

by Ben Martinez

I know that I am a bit of a nerd when it comes to politics and political concepts but when I think about liberty and freedom, and I am sure I am not the only one, I immediately think of the Declaration of Independence. The Declaration which declared, as mentioned in the readings, that there exists a certain minimum area of personal freedom which must never be violated. They declared rights such as life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness to be inalienable rights or rights that are so undeniable that no one and especially no government can take them away. Although the founders declared all three to be inalienable, I occasionally wonder when I read that line whether they were intentionally listed in that order. Were they trying to tell us something? For example where they saying: you can limit the pursuit of happiness to ensure liberty and limit liberty to protect life? I don’t think they were but it raises an interesting topic of the balance between security and liberty.


In the readings Isaiah Berlin mentions the limits of freedom. He says that great thinkers have been asserting that if we had unlimited freedom, “because it would entail a state in which all men could boundlessly interfere with all other men; and this kind of 'natural' freedom would lead to social chaos in which men's minimum needs would not be satisfied”. He goes on to say that “they put high value on other goals, such as justice, or happiness, or culture, or security, or varying degrees of equality, they were prepared to curtail freedom in the interests of other values and, indeed, of freedom itself.” They would curtail ‘freedom’ in the interest of ‘freedom’.


Is it ever necessary to give up certain freedoms to preserve others? Before we can answer this question we must first decide what liberty and freedom mean? Well liberty can mean a lot of things, it can be the freedom to do a certain act without fear of danger or harm, it can be the freedom to receive the minimum resources necessary to reach ones own potential, or it can be the freedom to remain unobstructed and pursue your own happiness. This brings us back to the questions at hand; can free action be limited by law? Can it be protected by law? Does this even make sense? If you go with the last definition probably not, however I think that certain rules are necessary to protect free action. Without rules we would be reduced to chaos; however I feel that those rules can and should be instituted in a way that would maximize freedom and limit regulation. In writing our Constitution the founders set up a framework to protect freedom. In reading the preamble you hear: “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America”. It is clear to me that they felt that liberty can be protected by a set of rules.


In closing I would like to end with a quote from Benjamin Franklin which I feel is relevant. The quote says “those who would give up essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty nor security.”