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FreeForAll.org
Spreading the hope of freedom

Welcome to FreeForAll.org

FreeForAll.org is dedicated to making the promise of America real for every American: Equality. Freedom of speech. Freedom of religion. The right to seek justice in a court of law. The right to cast a vote that counts. The American Way.

Our vision is a vibrantly diverse democratic society in which everyone is treated equally under the law, given the freedom and opportunity to pursue their dreams, and encouraged to participate in our nation’s civic and political life. Our America respects diversity, nurtures creativity and combats hatred and bigotry.

We believe a society that reflects these constitutional principles and progressive values is worth fighting for, and we take seriously our responsibility to cultivate new generations of leaders and activists who will sustain these values for the life of this nation.

Our operational mission is to promote the American Way and defend it from attack, to build and nurture communities of support for our values, and to equip those communities to promote progressive policies, elect progressive candidates, and hold public officials accountable.

What is freedom?

One might go beyond the realm of reality and visualize or imagine that freedom is a state whereby one is free from the control of fate or of necessity. For the less fanciful: freedom might be conceived as an exemption or release from slavery or imprisonment. But freedom is more than that: it is personal: it is an exemption or release from "arbitrary, despotic, or autocratic control," as the OED has put it. It is "the power of self-determination attributed to the will": it is independence: it is the state of being able to act without hindrance or restraint: it is liberty of action.

Holmes described it as the "right of strict social discrimination of all things and persons, [and it] is one of the most precious privileges." And, Locke: "... in our being able to act, or not to act, according as we shall choose, or will." And, Lord Acton: "By liberty I mean assurance that every man shall be protected in doing what he believes to be his duty against the influence of authority and majorities, custom and opinion."

It is not likely that anyone of us has had a cup of it this morning; nor, is it likely, that anyone of us has a special stash of it under a floor board. Freedom is not a physical thing, its not to be directly sensed. It's a concept: it's a mental construct; it's a, --- Well, its a -- a state of affairs, -- that's what freedom is. Should you find yourself, in a damp dungeon with only two exits, -- the one covered with bars and which looks out over a moat many feet down, and the other covered by a great door bolted from the outside (and maybe, just for good measure, a great brute of a man with a machine gun stationed just outside) -- you will quickly conclude that you are beset by a sad state of affairs. Equally as well, but likely even considerably more so, you would have the same reaction if somebody had a gun pointed at your head, -- in which event, you have arrived at a very sad state of affairs, indeed. In these two illustrations one might say that there exists a state of freedom (a state which cannot be described in absolute terms), which, practically speaking, is non-existent. There does not exist for a human, nor will it ever happen, unless you believe in heaven, that a perfect state of affairs will come about for any of us. Freedom normally comes to each of us but it can only exist in degrees; it is essential, I argue, to life itself; and it is most certainly expungable, especially if your adversary comes equipped with prisons and guns.

We would like to make it as plain as we can, that while freedom is not a measurable physical thing (and, thus, it cannot be measured by any objective standard): it does exist for all humans up to the very point of his or her death; and, we repeat ourselves, only does so by degrees. One might be restricted a little and get on with life quite well; indeed, a little general restriction, paradoxically, is necessary so that the most amount of freedom can be had by all (and there you have the raison d'etre for government). There is a point, however, at which a limitation of freedom will effect our well-being, and if freedom be taken away, then the person effected will, in time, die. Freedom, for this reason, is, as we will further elaborate, fundamental to life, to one's existence; it can be, in a way, likened to the air we breath, there is normally no joy in the act or in the experience, but its absence will bring about misery and eventual death. To the extent we have freedom we have the ability to proceed in life to make the necessary decisions in life which suit our individual purposes. Freedom is the general state of affairs in which we exist; it allows a person to take action, which, whether calculated or not, is personally tailored and designed to suit the goals and objectives which the individual actor has set for himself, or herself. The ultimate goal (entirely predictable) for all sane and healthy individuals (the great mass of us) is to advance, on the medium term, the interests of themselves and/or the members of their particular family.

The Nature of Freedom

    "The root of all well-ordered social action is a sentiment of justice, which at once insists on personal freedom and is solicitous for the like freedom of others; and there at present exists but a very inadequate amount of this sentiment." (Herbert Spencer.)

It is necessary that a person grasp the meaning of freedom: it is no easy task. If a person is to understand what it is like to lose something; then, it will be necessary to make him appreciate what it is that he is at risk of losing. What is it that a person shall miss when her freedom is trampeled or stolen away from her. It is usually easy to show a person what they might feel if a concrete possession of theirs goes a'missing. As Professor Bruno Leoni has pointed out, it is always easier for the listener or reader to understand matters when we talk or write of material things, "we find it rather easy to be understood by our listeners. Should uncertainty arise about the meaning of our words, it would be sufficient, in order to eliminate the misunderstanding, simply to point to the thing we are naming or defining."

The principal difficulty is that freedom is a concept, not a percept; we cannot point to freedom or stick out our hand and feel it.

Next let us turn to David Hume: "By liberty then we can only mean a power of acting or not acting, according to the determinations of the will; this is, if we choose to remain at rest, we may; if we choose to move, we also may."

And now to John Stuart Mill: "The only freedom which deserves the name, is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it."

Note that we refer to the individual's possession of that precious right of freedom: I say individual. Freedom is a relative concept and can only be possessed by the individual: it cannot be possessed like a parcel of land, in common, by a group of people. An individual, a particular individual, either has freedom, or not. It was that great French legal thinker Frédéric Bastiat who put his finger on this concept: "It is not the union of all liberties - liberty of conscience, of education, of association, of the press, of travel, of labor, of trade? In short, is not liberty the freedom of every person to make full use of his faculties, so long as he does not harm other persons while doing so?"

Thus; liberty be a state of being, where an individual is sovereign and answerable only to himself; where each is free to put at stake: his own life, his own well-being, his own time and his own property; where each, at all times, lives and acts as he wants within society at his own cost or to his own benefit, as the case may be; subject only and always to the restriction that an individual cannot proceed to act if that act clashes with or is in violation of the liberty of another.

The Necessity of Freedom

    "Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end."
    - Lord Acton.

Freedom is not something we have gained through the efforts of our ancestors; but, rather, it is something with which we are born; it comes with life's package. It is, as I have already asserted, something that is necessary to our very evolvement and is necessary to our continued involvement in life.

    "It seems to me that this is theoretically right, for whatever the question under discussion - whether religious, philosophical, political, or economic; whether it concerns prosperity, morality, equality, right, justice, progress, responsibility, cooperation, property, labor, trade, capital, wages, taxes, population, finance, or government - at whatever point on the scientific horizon I begin my researches, I invariably reach this one conclusion: The solution to the problems of human relationships is to be found in liberty. ... all hope rests upon the free and voluntary actions of persons within the limits of right ..." (Bastiat.)

In all of this, however, it is to be remembered, that we are all bound by the natural order of things. In the natural order of entities, there is no such thing as absolute freedom: each of us has his or her own master.

    "He must have a master; but the master may be Nature or may be a fellow man. When he is under the impersonal coercion of Nature, we say that he is free; and when he is under the personal coercion of some one above him, we call him, according to the degree of his dependence, a slave, a serf, or a vassal." (Spencer.)