Freedom vs Liberty:

Rights are freedoms given to you by the state. Liberty is yours by the nature of being born. You have the option of exercising liberty in opposition of your freedoms/rights or in concert with your freedoms/rights.

So, you don't believe in the concept of "Universal Human Rights"?

Max is supposed to love irony, yet he constantly behaves in an unwittingly ironic matter.

Bob started this thread in a vain attempt to stop Livinglava derail another thread about sports and covid 19, with unnecessary and irrelevant comments about liberty.

Livinglava hasn’t commented on this thread, but Max has done his level best to derail it.

Rights are theoretical. Liberty is action. Freedoms are derived from a second party.

One demands rights, is given freedom, has liberty.

Only a person with liberty can demand rights. A person with no sense of liberty can demand nothing.

Just think, though - neither I nor Max are shitting on anyone else's thread. I've taken the liberty of giving Max the freedom to **** here, which he mistakes for one of his "universal rights".

Poor livinglava doesn't feel at liberty to avail herself of that freedom. One cannot have freedom without liberty.

Liberty is a philosophy of governance that influences how the role of government and the state are regarded vis-a-vis individual self-governance.

So the idea of liberty is that it is good to transfer authority to the people to regulate themselves directly if doing so is possible/tolerable.

If liberty is deemed insufficient to protect/prevent certain harms, then the question arises whether to abridge liberty in favor of external regulation.

This quote from Learned Hand explains it subtly:

Basically, this quote means that if we fail at liberty because people are taking advantage of it to exercise freedom however they like, in an unbridled way; that leads to the overthrow of liberty.

In short, the more people behave themselves and contain their impulses, the more likely it is that faith in liberty will be sustained and that people will respect each others' right to freely self-govern.

Hand is also remembered as a pioneer of modern approaches to statutory interpretation. His decisions in specialist fields, such as patents, torts, admiralty law, and antitrust law, set lasting standards for craftsmanship and clarity. On constitutional matters, he was both a political progressive and an advocate of judicial restraint. He believed in the protection of free speech and in bold legislation to address social and economic problems. He argued that the United States Constitution does not empower courts to overrule the legislation of elected bodies, except in extreme circumstances. Instead, he advocated the "combination of toleration and imagination that to me is the epitome of all good government".[3] WIKI.


He was no libertarian and he believed in the structure of law.

He believed that laws could bring about changes on economic and social issues. Just the opposite of what you claim. He believed in free speech and he believed that freedoms came down from law.

I didn't post the quote to discuss the person apart from the quote. This thread is about liberty, not Learned Hand or anything else he did or didn't do.

I'm not a libertarian and I've told you that multiple times. You are confused by the fact the word, 'libertarian' contains the word, 'liberty.' They are unrelated, or rather their relationship is irrelevant to this discussion.

Are you looking for a fight? YOU brought up Learned Hand to make your point and I'm allowed to demonstrate his quote with context. You don't give me freedoms or stricture: I am a man in liberty.

You keep telling me who you aren't. So who are you?

You're not making a point with context, you're changing the subject by shifting focus to the person quoted and then talking about other aspects of him that are off topic.


Even after I explained that liberty is about self-governance, you're still using it interchangeably with 'freedom to exercise freedom."


It's not about me. I was trying to explain liberty because you wanted to discuss it in a different thread than the one where it came up. That was a wise/responsible move, so I found this thread and explained liberty. Now you're shifting the discussion and insisting that it's your liberty/freedom to do so. Are you just trying to conflate the meaning of 'liberty' with the meaning of 'freedom' more broadly, or do you still just not understand the difference?

You certainly gave a one dimensional nod to Hand tailored to make a point (wwhat ever it was). I'm allowed to respond to your point purely because I say I'm allowed to and because that's how polite and people discuss things honestly.

Once again, you've gone off track trying to divert the topic.

When you get back on track re: the topic, ie liberty vs freedom I will respond to you.

Please reread the entire thread - I've been patiently separating liberty from freedom the entire time: liberty comes from the individual and freedom comes from the state.

One last thought for now:

Everything you talk about seems to be taken word for word from here:

https://larouchepub.com/

Particularly:

https://larouchepub.com/other/2020/4722-larouche_plan_3_how_to_create_millions.html

And:

https://larouchepub.com/special_report/2019/1123-EndChinaWitchhunt/

I gave you the quote from Hand to illustrate how unbridled freedom leads to the overthrow of liberty.

The state is an authoritarian system. Liberty is the idea that people can effectively and responsibly govern themselves without the state or other top-down regime.

Liberty is an ideal that doesn't actually happen 100% in practice because, as Learned Hand says, unbridled exercise of freedom leads to the overthrow of liberty. State power is one form of authoritarianism that can respond to the failure of liberty, among others.

Liberty is always a gamble. If there are people who can stand to trust people with their own freedom long enough to see if they will do right by it, then liberty might prove sufficient to govern people. When it fails, authoritarianism in the form of the state or otherwise rises up.

Sometimes, the interest in establishing grounds for authoritarian power/structure pro-actively stimulate freedom to reach its limits. This is what we see happening all the time with the liberal culture, which puts out media-culture valorizing and encouraging self-indulgence and other exercises of freedom that are likely to provoke authoritarian response, taxation, regulation, etc.

They do this because there is money and power to be had in authoritarianism, and when liberty effectively results in a good society, there's no reason to pump money into all sorts of government institutions to fix the problems of irresponsible exercise of freedom.

Liberty is only an ideal for people who don't have liberty. I have liberty. I have the liberty to do what I want and I accept the consequences.

I only have the freedoms the state gives me. Freedoms don't make you truly free, they give you the boundaries of an illusionary freedom: they're the prison walls. Only a man at liberty is a free man.

Try reading some Hegel.

Now the point is whether people can use their liberty to do the right thing when it comes to things like preventing the spread of an airborne virus, modifying their habits of work and life to reverse climate change, etc.

People are motivated by desire for everything from money to just social interaction and entertainment to comfort and convenience. Can they forego things they desire in order to prevent a virus from spreading and/or in order to bring down CO2 levels?

And if they can't, and that government/state intervenes, will it actually do anything that helps the situation or will it just do things that lobbyists want and things that will win votes from happy constituents? E.g. if keeping sports shut-down is important to prevent the spread of a pandemic virus, are there elected leaders who will risk making themselves unpopular by simply leveling with people that sports are not a need but a want? Are there elected leaders who can tell people and the auto industry that motor vehicles and driving are a luxury that should be reserved for only an elite class of people and the vast majority of the public should be re-conditioned to get around without a motor-vehicle?

These are the kinds of hard-sacrifices that people fail at whether they are governing themselves by their own liberty or whether they are holding the jobs of elected representative hostage so that they will tell them what they want to hear and allow businesses to operate that give them things and money they want regardless of how bad the effects might be.

Face it, the thing government is best at is giving people more or less what they want and then rationalizing it to them by framing it as part of a larger plan to achieve progress, reform, sustainability, or whatever. The whole point is to distract people from what's really going on in the present by giving them grand visions of what the future will be like. All the while, consumer desires and the will to serve them are what's actually steering government.

The state can give you freedoms and leave, but cannot give you liberty. Liberty comes from the individual and doesn't have a thing to with money or possessions.

You have not yet acknowledged what I have explained about liberty as self-regulation, so I guess I should just assume you just want to go on making all these claims you are making without explaining them.

Self regulation is not liberty. Self regulation is antithetical to liberty. Self regulation is an attempt to deny the state's offer of freedom as the limitation of liberty. Its a denial of self-hood.

Livinglava: don't you just ******* hate it? I make a lot of sense to you and it makes you crazy!!!!

You don't realize you just want to exchange one system for another. Any system is a manifestation of the state. All you look for is a state that recognizes what a smart little cog you are and will place you on a bigger gear. There's no liberty there and damn little freedom. Just a bigger obligation to the state. Heavier chains. Golden cages are still cages.

Ok, finally you say something clear I can understand and work with.

So freedom is what we have fundamentally in a state of total nature, or a hypothetical one anyway in which there is no herd-control as there is with animals. So if you imagine a state of non-organization without any power exercised between individuals, where we can do whatever we choose; that is freedom . . . but the moment humans begin to exercise freedom in a natural state, we begin to affect each other and each others' property/resources, as well as common/public resources such as water sources, land, etc.

So imagine you live in a simple village of independent farmers, and there is a common water source, say a lake, where farmers dig irrigation canals to bring water from the lake to their farm plots. As long as the water level stays sufficient and not polluted and no one is harming each other, they all just respect each others' freedom to live and farm and use the common lake.

But as soon as some farmers begin expanding their land to feed more children they've had, or the lake begins drying up because they're using water too liberally, etc. then conflicts ensue and people start seeking to regulate each other and common resources. Thus power and authority becomes a way of limiting others' freedom to cause harm.

For this reason, there have always been kings/monarchies and governmental authority to regulate how people live so that they don't harm each other and/or common resources.

Some people, however, realized that individuals are capable of governing themselves just as well as they can be governed by external authority, just by behaving themselves in a way that doesn't provoke the need for regulation. In short, the idea is that if I behave myself and/or do my work adequately without being controlled/managed, then why do I need a manager to control me?

So liberty is the principle that we can rule ourselves independently instead of having external authority to lord over us. I.e. we don't need a nanny because we can behave ourselves just fine on our own.

Now that is the ideal, but what happens in practice? Do we really behave ourselves well enough to be left alone to our own devices? There are a lot of social problems and future unsustainability, so the question is what is causing all those problems and how can they be solved, either by external governance or by self-regulation with our own liberty?

What I contend about external governance is that it's not working BECAUSE people exercise freedom in various ways to prevent it from doing so. Economic stimulus, for example, is used to pump up growth and job-creation and, supposedly, it is being done in a way that's supposed to achieve sustainability. It doesn't, however, because the economic standards of consumption, work, transportation, etc. are all unsustainable and none of those industries want to reduce their footprint because that is how they make money and create jobs. So while government pretends like it is solving sustainability/climate problems, it's really just stimulating investments in lots of different ideas that won't ever materialize into something that replaces the status quo because the status quo gets funded by the (failing) investments of industry-newcomers who hire people and create contracts with other firms that hire people, all in an ostensible effort to create green business and renewable energy, etc. but when that money is flowing, people are using it to go on living according to the old standards, driving and flying and living in big air-conditioned houses and going around to big air-conditioned stores and attractions, offices, etc.

So the government just isn't working to fix the climate/sustainability, because all it really does is invest in more organizations and jobs that pay people at levels that fund all the industrial-consumerism that is bad for the climate/sustainability. If everyone would make the needed sacrifices in their personal choices of how to live, then you would start to see sustainability emerge; but they don't take the liberty to that; instead they go on living the way they believe they're supposed to to live a 'normal life,' work a full-time job that they drive to, where they wear long-pants and long-sleeved shirts that require air-conditioning to keep them cool, then they drive out to suburban subdivisions with lots of big multilane roads and shopping centers and offices between them and their houses competing for business, and all that developed land adds up to massive deforestation and ecocide, yet people don't even notice it because it has been so long since it was forest, they only pay attention to new development that is encroaching into currently-forested areas, and not realizing they have to change the way they live in already-developed areas so the natural ecology can be restored, pavement reduced, tree canopy and undergrowth restored, all the while finding new ways to live and build infrastructure that fits within a sustainability paradigm.

Democrats try to use government investment and regulation to pursue the sustainability paradigm, but it doesn't work because the growth-and-jobs emphasis keeps maintaining wage levels that fund the consumer behavior and business behavior that maintain and protect the status quo.

Plus Democrats are obsessed with 'closing the gap' between the middle-class and the rich, which produces a defensiveness among people who have anything to lose, and that provokes them into working that much harder to keep the economy generating more wealth for them, which the Democrats keep trying to force them to re-invest in more higher-paying jobs, which stimulates the working classes and middle classes to keep driving around in the rat-race and doing all the business and investment and infrastructure activities that keep the economy in its current, unsustainable state.

Covid19 has been a wake-up call in terms of how it is possible for us to live in a way that doesn't involve going out very much, but so many people are just itching to go "back to normal" instead of realizing that we should continue building on the current economic-calming because it is good in multiple ways, i.e. not just for slowing the spread of pandemic diseases, but also for climate/sustainability, and also ultimately for economic health and preventing/reversing inflation, which would/will happen if people keep reducing their spending and businesses keep figuring out ways to fulfill economic needs with lower levels of investment/borrowing.