Security Is Freedom

Not my words, but words from one of America's greatest presidents of all time: Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He didn't speak the exact words "security is freedom," but his policies during his time in Office, which lasted from 1933 until his death in 1945, said exactly these words.

_{source: Wikipedia}

On January 1st 1944 FDR explained in his State of the Union exactly what it takes for an individual to be free, and I happen to agree.

This Republic had its beginning, and grew to its present strength, under the protection of certain inalienable political rights-among them the right of free speech, free press, free worship, trial by jury, freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures. They were our rights to life and liberty.

The only word I would choose differently here, or just leave out, is "inalienable", because no rights are inalienable, God-given or natural, they're all political and economical, as FDR will make clear in just a moment;

As our Nation has grown in size and stature, however-as our industrial economy expanded—these political rights proved inadequate to assure us equality in the pursuit of happiness.

Here he's warming us up on the idea that the expanding economy plays a huge role by linking the inadequacy of the "inalienable" political rights to the expanding industrial economy. Personally I would have linked it to capitalism in general, but hey, he's not wrong.

We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. "Necessitous men are not free men." People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.

This doesn't need any clarification or comment, other than that I find the phrase "Necessitous men are not free men" particularly well suited to make the link between freedom and economic security. FDR had formulated four freedoms, which he wanted to bring into practice through the proposition of a Second Bill of Rights, an Economic Bill of Rights; freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want and freedom from fear. Yes my dear friends, FDR was an unapologetic idealist and wasn't afraid to let it be known. Especially the last two, freedom from want and freedom from fear, were the targets aimed at with his Second Bill of Rights; unfortunately he died just before the Second World War ended, and from then till now all subsequent governments on both sides have slowly but surely undone everything the most successful president of all times had achieved.

Franklin Delano would turn in his grave if he could see how far we've moved away from his expressed ideals. It's in the nature of ideologies to never come true, that's not why they exist; the fact that true democracy, pure democracy can never be realized does not in any way imply that we should stop trying to achieve something as close to true democracy as possible. As technology improves, we'll relocate the bar for what's realistically attainable, but we must never lose sight of the ideal. Ideologies exist because they point to a general direction, preferably one with the most net gain in happiness for most individuals, and all individuals if and when resources and technology permit it.

Freedom from want and freedom from fears. This was only seven decades ago people, but today FDR would be called a communist or socialist because people don't even know the meaning of these words anymore. Sure, language always evolves with time, but if we've inherited one thing from both world wars, it's the use of propaganda, and never before or since has so much energy been wasted in anti-communist propaganda in the west and anti-capitalist propaganda in the former Eastern Bloc; the meaning of the corresponding economical ideologies, capitalism and communism, have been severely muddled.

Capitalism, true capitalism or what's now called laissez faire, is an ideology. It's not feasible. Impossible. Society would break apart on all levels. If everything is left to the markets, they would self-destruct. For a quick illustration let's look at Monopoly, the game. Monopoly is pure capitalism; when played to its conclusion there's one winner with all the money, and three losers with nothing. Think about this: Monopoly is also the game in which players among themselves decide to keep bending the rules to keep the game going on and on and on... Sometimes one game takes days to finish, with intermezzo's of players quibbling among one another about perceived or real cheating, completely forgetting that we all agreed that bending the rules was okay. Or not? As long as all of us agree on the rule bending, and we all play by the same rules, no harm is done.

Pure capitalism, only market and no government intervention whatsoever, would be a disaster, and even the most enthusiastic defenders of less government involvement are grateful that their car is safe, that their houses are built with certain safety rules in mind. Anyone that ever had a house built by contractors knows that there's a tendency to cut costs to maximize profits, and that where costs are cut unsafe buildings are made. Even the simple, and might I say political, agreement that trading humans is in conflict with the "inalienable" right to individual freedom, is in itself a regulation of the markets. Pure capitalism is a fantasy.

This might come as a shock to some of you, but pure communism is exactly the same; a fantasy. But a fantasy with many similarities to the fantasy of pure capitalism. In communism there's no government either. If this surprises you, then that's a sign of the effect of more than half a century of propaganda. If you believe that what we see in Russia, China, North Korea or Venezuela, is in any way representative of what communism is, or what socialism is, then I'm sorry to say you've been misled. What a country calls itself is not what it is. The "Democratic People's Republic of Korea" is what North Korea calls itself, but its not a democracy, not for the people and not a republic. Stalin was not a communist but exactly the same as Hitler and Mussolini; he was a fascist. And none of them were socialist, despite all of them claiming the title. In communism there is no government, no state, no leader or social classes, you might even say there is no money in communism as everybody just provides labor to their ability and just take what they need.

...a socioeconomic order structured upon the common ownership of the means of production and the absence of social classes, money, and the state.
_{source: Wikipedia}

Communism is a fantasy. Both these extremes make the same mistake: they see individuals as rational actors instead of largely emotionally driven human beings. The ideal of communism breaks down as soon as a farmer decides to give someone slightly more grain because it's a close friend. The ideal of capitalism breaks down as soon as the first monopoly is born, as it inescapably will. Whatever we decide our economy to be, it will always be a mixed economy, somewhere between the idealistic extremes. At least for now, because we're not done evolving as a species or as cultures.

Which brings me back to the ideology of democracy, the one that got lost and ripped apart in the eternal tug of war between fundamentalists on both sides of this narrow, one dimensional ideological spectrum. Democracy, true democracy, is located on one end of another spectrum, on the other side of which resides dictatorship. We associate individual freedom with democracy because in a democracy, the ideal democracy, each individual has an equal amount of power to influence all decisions; freedom therefore can be seen as a perfectly equal and egalitarian distribution of power. Power concentrated in the hands of one dictator, or in the hands of a few, is the opposite of freedom. So we now have two spectra, one from communist to capitalist, and one from democracy to dictatorship; I hope, dear reader, that you can already see that we move between both of them, always moving toward one or the other side, but never reaching either of them.

FDR was re-elected three times and was by far the most popular American president of all times. In my opinion his New Deal is the best we can do to keep capitalism fair. The rules of this real life Monopoly game needs to have its rules bent to the extent that the game goes on forever. Now in the real world we don't have the strict scale limitations of the Monopoly game, which is why capitalism won't produce one individual with all the power, but a select few who share the power and who collaborate to keep the power. As long as we're not ready to invent a new game altogether, a game whose rules don't need to be bent, a game in which not only private property but also shared property is abolished, a game with no property at all, as long as we're not there, the relationship between wealth and freedom needs to be recognized. I give you FDR:

_{A Second Bill of Rights}

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