The sad truth is what fuels the anti-liberty agenda of the liberal cult: masses of fools simply won’t know what they’ve got ’til it’s gone.
And it’s a really big deal when somebody takes yours away. But if you inherited it, and never were without it, you don’t really appreciate it, and just think it’ll always be there.
Social is good doers and busybodies want to have power over that which is not their property. They are the ones who infringe on others freedom via property right violations. They say; “it becomes my business if you actions infringe on my freedom. You may think you have an unbridled freedom to do whatever you want, whenever, but you will have to accept the responsibility for what may follow from your selfishness. We have to reach an accommodation, an agreement. That’s called compromise, and is what community and being a good neighbor is all about.”
My response is; ” I don’t compromise my liberty. If it is not your property, it is not your business.”
The doo-gooder response will be along the line of; “So you can defecate upstream in the water I have to drink? I don’t think so.”
It happens everyday.
Such thinking as yours pushes responsibility from you for you to others.
For instance, I once went backpacking along pristine Lake Superior. Others who got the mandatory lecture from the park ranger were appalled the ranger recommended filtering your water. In defense the park ranger put the burden on the drinker saying, you don’t know if a beaver just peed in the water around the bend or a dead moose is decaying in the water just out of sight.
If you own the water as it flows along your property, it is YOUR responsibility to make sure it’s purity meets your high standards.
Liberty is bounded by attendant responsibility; freedom is not.
Consider, for example, that the word “freedom” is rarely used in our organic charters, and in the published arguments for and against their ratification. Instead, when natural rights are concerned, the word “liberty” is used, to denote a latitude tempered by the responsibility not to violate the equal rights of others.
The quintessential example of the word freedom in our organic charters comes, of course, from the First Amendment guarantee that “Congress shall make no law… abridging freedom of speech, or of the press…” That admonition secured a pair of civil liberties against prior restraint. It does not refer to the right of speech or of the press, which are bounded by the equal rights of others, but rather secures the boundless freedom against government intervention before the fact.
That is to say, freedom of speech is the entirely limitless latitude to say anything at all without restriction beforehand. The right of speech, a facet of liberty, is the latitude to say that which does not necessarily violate the equal rights of others.
So imagine I say something defamatory about you that destroyed your reputation and ruined your livelihood. When you sue me in a court of competent jurisdiction and win a judgement against me, that court is providing remedy because I trespassed beyond the natural definition of liberty because my latitude of speech violated your rights. But that court had to allow me to make the defamatory statement before it could act. If it punished me before I uttered the defamatory words, it would have violated my freedom of speech, because freedom is unbounded and absolute.
My freedom to swing my arm has no limit, but my right to swing my arm usually ends at your nose… unless you are presently violating my right to my life, liberty, or property, at which point I have every right to punch you and more.
Freedom is liberty’s amoral cousin.
Freedom and responsibility go hand in hand. This is why the same liberal cult that wants to make us un-free also tries to take away personal responsibility, replacing it with government force. Patriots do the opposite of that. And this is a fundamental difference between the two camps.
Liberty requires taking responsibility for one’s personal well being and one’s own actions.
Liberty is like money and sex: it only seems like a big deal when you aren’t getting any of it.