The Necessity of Freedom, Part 4 to blupete's Essay
"On Liberty"
"Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end."Freedom is not something we have gained through the efforts of our ancestors; but, rather, it is something with which we are born; it comes with life's package. It is, as I have already asserted, something that is necessary to our very evolvement and is necessary to our continued involvement in life.
- Lord Acton.
"It seems to me that this is theoretically right, for whatever the question under discussion - whether religious, philosophical, political, or economic; whether it concerns prosperity, morality, equality, right, justice, progress, responsibility, cooperation, property, labor, trade, capital, wages, taxes, population, finance, or government - at whatever point on the scientific horizon I begin my researches, I invariably reach this one conclusion: The solution to the problems of human relationships is to be found in liberty. ... all hope rests upon the free and voluntary actions of persons within the limits of right ..." (Bastiat.)In all of this, however, it is to be remembered, that we are all bound by the natural order of things. In the natural order of entities, there is no such thing as absolute freedom: each of us has his or her own master.
"He must have a master; but the master may be Nature or may be a fellow man. When he is under the impersonal coercion of Nature, we say that he is free; and when he is under the personal coercion of some one above him, we call him, according to the degree of his dependence, a slave, a serf, or a vassal." (Spencer.)12
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