Our President often talks about freedom. He talks generally about two different kinds of freedom:

• Political Freedom. The basic right to vote and chose elected officials with some basic rights afforded to all modern states.
• Economic Freedom. The right to form a corporation, and run it uninhabited from government.

The problem with those notions of freedom is they are often very limited and ignore the need for any definition of freedom to respect human dignity. Freedom without dignity is not freedom at all. Dignity is a sense of pride and self-respect, where an individual or his political entity is allowed to choose what they want.

Political freedom is very limited under the Bush doctrine. Every state should have dignity, and the right to choose whether or not a democratic process is right for them. Indeed when you consider the President’s philosophy towards freedom in the Middle East you see the opposite: contempt to these people’s beliefs and forms of government, along with the use of power to impose will. In a similar vein, President Bush believes that our country should use force to impose standardized beliefs such as the rights of women on those countries despite their religious opposition to treating women as equal.

Economic freedom is broad under the Bush doctrine. Our President believes that people should have the right to form corporations and sell goods with relatively little inference from the government. He emphasizes the drag that regulation has on the economy and how small businesses are hurt by big government. The costs of pollution on other industries or how business can control the individual is rarely considered through that doctrine.

A Better Notion of Freedom?

Our President is wrong when it comes to freedom. Freedom is not at all a question of type of government or the regulation of businesses. Instead freedom should be about protecting the rights of an individual to self-determination in generally tolerable ways. Specifically freedom should involve:

• Right to be Left Alone
• Right to Live Where You Want
• Right to Choice of Occupation and Ability to the Education You Need
• Right to Speak Your Mind and Have Any Feelings You Want
• Right to Live in an Healthy Environment That Protects the Self

We need to create a broad-based society that allows people maximum freedom of action and choice for whatever they believe is right, as long as it can be tolerated by others. If you want to move to Nelson and farm, to Owls Head and join a militia, or to live in the big city and be an investment banker then so be it as long as your generally not causing substantive damage to other’s civil liberties or the environment.

Providing such freedom means we need an activist government that is neutral in content. We need programs that subsidize farming and create low-income housing; we need programs that force people to respect the right of crazies who want to bear arms in Owls Head. We need to have livable citizens free of the terror that is on so many of them today. There is no one type of government that could best do this, except one that creates limits on it’s own power and protects those who chose to deviate from the mainstream.