FREEDOM--RIGHTS AND RESPONSIBILITIES
-”Tyler, I am really interested in how your country came about and what directions it has been taking. Can you give us a little background on your emphasis on liberty rather than equality as your basis for justice?”
"You really jumped right into the pit. I know that you are a businessman Con, so I assume that you will understand our philosophy of freedom. Beginning with your American Revolution, people have usually thought of justice as being primarily about both liberty and equality. They assumed that when the French chanted ‘liberty, equality and fraternity,’ it was really possible. The equality goal that your Founding Fathers called for in your American Declaration of Independence was what justice was about when you wanted independence. But in your original Constitution 'equality' is never mentioned. It is all about liberty--freedom. So what your founders did was to jump from one possible element of justice, equality, to another possible element, liberty, as they moved from underlings of the British king to being free of his yoke. Both liberty and equality are not possible to have at the same time at a 100% level. To the degree that you have equality you tend to reduce liberty, and vice a versa.
"Let me give you a quick outline of the principles of our society. As you will see we emphasize liberty, not equality. You people in the West, especially in northern Europe, emphasize equality. Our emphasis on liberty gives us a libertarian society which is quite different from those that you are used to in the West.
"Liberty requires responsibility. Without the responsibility to allow others freedom you have only anarchy. Among the elements of responsibility that we hold dear are honesty and the respect for others' freedom.
“Since liberty is our major concern. People are not equal but they must be given equality of opportunity to find out who are superior in intelligence, creativity, or in their work ethics.
“We must therefore have outstanding schools to allow people to achieve to their fullest. Along with this, a person must earn his citizenship. Being born here does not guarantee one's citizenship. Citizenship can also be rescinded. You may remember some years ago that President Sarkozy of France suggested stripping certain people of their citizenship, people like major criminals and drug traffickers. He was met with a great deal of criticism because once you are a French citizen it can't be taken away from you. Our Constitution allows us to take away citizenship. We have a companion country where we can send noncitizens. They run their own show there!
“Third, people are responsible for their own lives and can end them if they want to. Society does not attempt to prolong people's lives or to control them.
“Fourth, we tax low throughout life and tax high at the end of life.
“Fifth, if people want children they are financially responsible for them and must pay for their educations through the university level.
"And last, as I said, if you are going to have freedom you must have responsibility toward others or you only have anarchy.
"We believe we are on the right track to a better civilization. And you may remember what Arnold Toynbee said, 'Civilization is a movement and not a condition, a voyage and not a harbor.' He also said that 'Civilizations in decline are consistently characterized by a tendency towards standardization and uniformity.' We think that you in America have reduced your efforts primarily to owning guns, watching electronic screens and nationalizing your religion. It's a blanket criticism and I know that many of you have crawled out from under the blanket. I think that you four may be among those who are not 'in uniform.'
LIBERTY NOT EQUALITY
“Now let me spend the rest of the day explaining how these principles work in practice. For the sake of clarity I will usually use your country to illustrate the kinds of problems that can develop when equality or a lack of responsibility create problems.
I had seen in your country people who call themselves libertarians but are not actually devotees of freedom. I've seen this in your Tea Party movement.
"I think it is evident that people are unequal in their intellectual capacities, their educations, their knowledge, and their awareness of their own situation and the situation of their own country and the world. Look at the ignorant Christian minister who was threatening to burn the Koran, he thought that the Arabic word Allah meant a different entity than the Christian word of God. Of course he was mistaken. Allah is this the Arabic word for the same entity. It didn't seem to matter to him because he went on and burned it anyway. Then a number of equally stupid Muslims, in retaliation, attacked people from the West in Afghanistan and killed several.
"Look at the ignorant Muslims who burned down embassies of both Norway and Denmark because a Danish newspaper had published cartoons which were offensive to them. They didn’t realize that Norway and Denmark are different countries. Look at the ignorant voters in your country who vote in representatives who don’t have a clue as to how to solve your nation’s problems. They often expect more social welfare perks while they want their taxes reduced."
-"I think we all realize that, but we often have not identified it with our psychological drives and our values. Tyler, when we visited Kino and talked to Professor Wang (1), we got a good idea of the differences in values that people have. And we began to realize that most of those values are based on assumptions that are not provable. Then when we visited Singaling and talked to Dr. Chan (2) we saw how the differences in psychological motivations push us in certain directions. Dr. Chan emphasized the drive for power that motivates most of us. Certainly in the illustrations you gave, whether they be differences in religions, race or in social class, we can see how one's own values and physical makeup can give them a feeling of power--and with that power a feeling of superiority.”
"True. Selfishness, or self-centeredness, is a basic for our human race. When we can amass enough money to live better, most people welcome the luxury. As a Chinese beauty queen recently told me ‘It’s better to cry in a limousine than laugh on a bicycle.’ Everyone has his or her own carrot and stick. The stick may whip us out of the poverty of the ghetto. The carrot is nearly always money or other avenues of power. And when power comes, wealth usually is its guardian angel.
“So you see if we are selfish, an equalitarian social philosophy is the anchor dragging down our liberty-- at least our liberty in the financial area.
"In order to have real freedom in a functioning society there are two pillars that are essential. One is that you must be responsible for not impinging on another person's liberty. Then to allow everyone a chance to succeed you must have equality of opportunity. As we go through the day I'm sure that I will be coming back to these pillars of our society again and again."
-"Tyler, what are our concerns here? Are we looking for world peace? Are we looking for the form of government that makes people the happiest? Are we merely looking for a government that pays its own way?”
"You tell me. What we have here in The Colonies is a system based on freedom. We like it. We are not trying to solve the world's problems, we merely want to have a place where it is safe to be free and where we must be responsible for ourselves.” -" I
-"Since the George W Bush days, non-thinking but fundamentalist Christian groups have taken over many of the legislatures. One of their big pushes has been to either outlaw or reduce abortions. And in some it was to allow the teaching of creationism."
-"I don't know what it is about your country. You talk so much about freedom, like freedom of speech and the freedom to own guns, but you don't give a woman the freedom to abort an embryo when she doesn't want to be a mother. Your male-dominated conservative religious legislatures seem to think that a fertilized ovum is a person. I can understand that if they are Catholic they might believe this because Pope Pius IX in 1854 decided, having been told by God, that the mother of Jesus had been conceived without original sin-- her Immaculate Conception.
-" I wonder why God waited until the mid-19th century to tell His flock that the soul slid into the ovum along with th
e sperm. That might have been put in the Gospels, or better, in the Ten Commandments.
-"Lee, Christian thinking that abortion is very bad, if not murder, has been the overwhelming Christian position since the earliest days. It is true that some, like St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, used Aristotle's ideas that the early embryo had the soul of a vegetable so theoretically abortion could have been performed. But this thinking was very far from the norm.”
- “Actually, in those early days the major concern was the rights of the father, not any rights for the fetus. But from what I know about it, while some said that it was murder to prevent a child from being born, it was Pius who clarified the issue on the soul--if you happen to believe him."
Book 9 A Libertarian Paradise Page 2
