Weekend Economists: "So much to do, so little done, such things to be." April 20-22, 2012

[Demeter]

26. Freedom from a Dead-End Life: True Liberty Means Defeating the RW's Nightmare Vision for America

http://www.alternet.org/story/155013/freedom_from_a_dead-end_life%3A_true_liberty_means_defeating_the_right-wing%27s_nightmare_vision_for_america?page=entire

The Right likes the parts of "big government" that limit our freedoms and attacks those that expand them...so accustomed are we to hearing the Right – a movement that historically opposed women's sufferage and black civil rights and still seeks to quash workers' right to organize and gay and lesbian Americans' right to marry– claim to be defenders of our liberties....Dig a little deeper, and it becomes clear that “freedom” for the Right offers most of us anything but. It’s the freedom for companies to screw their workers, pollute, and otherwise operate free of any meaningful regulations to protect the public interest. It’s about the wealthiest among us being free from the burden of paying a fair share of the taxes that help finance a smoothly functioning society.

The flip side is that programs that assure working Americans a decent existence are painted as a form of tyranny approaching fascism. The reality is that they impinge only on our God-given right to live without a secure social safety net. It’s the freedom to go bankrupt if you can’t afford to treat an illness; the liberty to spend your golden years eating cat food if you couldn’t sock away enough for a decent retirement....you have to disaggregate what we mean by “government.” You can divide it up, roughly, into a “security state,” a “social welfare state,” a “public infrastructure state,” and a “regulatory state” (there’s obviously some overlap with such broad categories).

...the expansion of the security state—criminalizing more behavior, increasing law enforcement’s surveillance of the public, and locking up more people—is a real threat to our personal liberties, and it, like the disastrous “war on drugs” is supported heartily by the Right (with a small number of exceptions in the libertarian wing of the conservative movement). The security state rounded up innocent Arab Americans after 9/11 and routinely locks up hundreds of thousands of nonviolent immigrants seeking economic opportunities. A greater share of our own population is behind bars than any other country in the world – we even lock up children “at more than six times the rate of all other developed nations,” according to Wired -- and while that sad reality is a bipartisan affair, it is driven by conservatives' innate respect for authority and desire for public order, not liberals' attempts to cut down on pollution...MORE