I am an American, and given what I consider to be my heritage, it seems perfectly natural to me that liberty would be of the highest priority. My country was founded in its pursuit by men who were willing to die for it, and a part of me dies when I hear about some new way that the government these men created to preserve it has found to infringe upon it. This is a value which is often misunderstood, and I am accused of being selfish or amoral, but the love of liberty is something innate in me which transcends all else, and I am willing to proclaim it and accept the consequences.
As a debater, I find myself in the minority as a person willing to take a strong stand on an subject. It is inherent in the nature of a values debate that a person forced to defend both sides of an issue will understand both points of view and be unsure as to which is true, even if he had been positive before, and this is necessary because it is rarely possible to argue convincingly for something one believes to be wrong. I was told at camp that the purpose of debate is not to clarify our moral thinking but to muddy it. Yet, despite the fact that I argued in tenth grade that a just social order ought to place the principle of equality above that of liberty, I do not believe this at all, and I am not convinced that I could effectively defend this side if asked to do so today.
The liberty that I value is not personal. It is not a desire on my part to be allowed to do anything I please. I recognize that a demand of liberty for myself and those who agree with me must be accompanied by a similar demand for the liberty of those I disagree with fundamentally, because freedom is worthless if it does not protect those whose opinions we despise, and if we do not extend the same rights to them, we cannot expect that those rights will be safe for us. The freedom to agree with the majority is no freedom at all, and therefore if the right is to have any meaning it cannot be limited because most people agree that those utilizing it are in the wrong. Sooner or later every thinking man will find himself in the minority, but if he has not spoken for others' rights, he will find, like Martin Niemoller, that there is noone left to speak for his.
I read On Liberty by John Stuart Mill in the summer between ninth and tenth grade, and I did not realize then how much of it I inherently agreed with. It was my growing distaste for politics and politicians that convinced me that if it weren't for human nature, anarchy would be the ideal state of society, and I wanted the government out of my life as much as possible. When I heard that social security would go bankrupt before I could benefit from it, I decided that I wanted to keep my money in my own hands, to decide for myself what to do with it. When I learned that Madison had objected to the need for a Bill of Rights because the government had enumerated powers, and infringing on our speech or denying us due process were not among them, I realized the vast number of ways that the government has exceeded its purpose in recent years. And when I read that there were 26,911 words of government regulations on the sale of cabbage, I was disgusted.
After I had come to these conclusions, I was reminded of On Liberty, and went back to it. Whether I had changed in two years, or whether I previously hadn't grasped the magnitude of what Mill was saying I do not know, but when we discussed political viewpoints in government and I learned the meaning of the world "libertarian," I knew immediately that that was who I was. I fully believe that the government is created with the sole purpose of preventing people from harming others, and it has no right to do anything beyond this. I believe that it was not created to legislate morality, because I believe morality to be individual, and not determined by majority rule. And I believe that if a person wants to do something which does not concern others, however much they think it is in his best interests to prevent it, he has the unconditional right to do it.
People have a tendency to think that their own conviction that they are right about something permits them to impose their views on others. Not only is this inherently wrong if we value liberty, but it can also be harmful to society as a whole. It is essential for the benefit of all that each person be allowed to decide for himself, and if a dissenting opinion emerges that it be heard. No matter how sure the majority of the people are that their viewpoint is the correct one, we should always remember that the majority believed that the sun revolved around the earth, and that Galileo was persecuted for claiming otherwise. And even if the dissenter is wrong in the end, it is better that he be honestly mistaken than forced to pretend to agree with others.
When people think of infringements of liberty, they often think of tyrants and dictators, of Hitler and Stalin, but liberty in America faces a very different problem. It is not malice but complacency that threatens our freedom. Those who had to fight for it new its value--the revolutionaries, the abolitionists, the civil rights activists--but today's generations have never had freedom taken from them, and they may not be cautious enough to preserve it. The danger lies in seemingly harmless restrictions, gradual encroachments on liberty that go unnoticed until suddenly we find ourselves in the midst of 1984, but nobody realizes it because they never recognized that anything was changing.
More and more, people expect the government to step in and fix every problem that they have. They believe that the world owes them a living, and if they cannot or choose not to provide for themselves, others should have to do it for them. If they feel disadvantaged in any way, it is up to Washington to make it right. But the government is not here to make our lives perfect at the expense of our freedom.
When I tell people that I am a libertarian, they automatically consider me to be selfish and amoral. They assume that I want to get rid of the law because I want to do things which are against it. They think that because I don't want the government to do a thing, that I don't want it done at all. But the reality is that in valuing liberty, I recognize a difference between what people ought to do and what they ought to be compelled to do. I believe in philanthropic organizations. The wealthy should help the poor, and it may even be wrong of them not to do so, but that does not mean it is the government's place to step in and force them to. It is a problem of our society that if I defend legalizing marijuana people will assume it is because I want to smoke marijuana, if I defend the right of people to make, sell, or buy pornography people will assume it is because I want to look at pornography, and if I defend the right of Nazis or the KKK to speak in public people will assume it is because I sympathize with their message. But the fact that morality will not be legislated does not mean that it will not exist, nor is it the morality of egoism in which whatever helps me is what I ought to do. Each person would simply be constrained by the dictates of his conscience instead of the legislature.
This value of liberty that I hold has never been tested, and so I cannot say how I would react, or whether it would truly guide my actions. I would like to think that I would be willing to give up my life for the principle of liberty because a life as a slave or a prisoner is of no avail, but it would be folly for me to say that I would. I dream of a cause that warrants this test, however, because the thing I want most in life is to matter, to have it make a difference to the world that I have lived, but great opportunities such as this are seldom, and in looking for them we often miss the small ones that surround us.
It seems perfectly natural to me that as an American, liberty is the thing I hold most dear, although many Americans are all too willing to sacrifice it for convenience or out of apathy. Our country was founded with a limited government, which has vastly exceeded its bounds, and I believe that our future depends on returning to the principle of liberty before we lose it, and don't realize it, and it is too late to regain it. If that day comes, for what avail are our lives?
