Liberty, the ability for the individual to act as he or she sees fit, without outside coercion, has been dead for a century or more, so why do we keep playing lip service to it?

Let’s look at the recent health care debate for a minute. I won’t take long.

You have one very large group of people who feel everyone deserves to be taken care of when they are sick. You have another very large group of people who feel that they’re not entirely comfortable with the idea of working hard to pay to take care of someone else.

The first group has the best interests of everyone at heart. They want everyone to be taken care of when they are sick, or injured, or in pain. They don’t want to pass people on the street, dying of appendicitis because they cannot pay a doctor to fix the problem. They don’t want people to lose their homes because they paid a doctor to fix a problem and now can’t afford to pay the doctor.

The second group doesn’t want any of that either. However, they also don’t feel that they should have money taken out of their pockets to pay to fix the situation. The second group respects liberty and hates coercion. They feel that perhaps some of the people who are in bad situations are in bad situations healthcare-wise because of bad choices that they made. They realize that some people who are in bad situations healthcare-wise because of circumstances beyond their own control.

Sometimes people from both groups help those less-fortunate people with money, time or other resources, but not enough to completely alleviate the problem.

So the first group has decided that everyone is now going to chip in and work for a portion of the year in order to try to fix the problem of some people not being able to afford to go to a doctor. This, over the objections of the second group, who is just as numerous as the first.

So who is right? Who is moral in this situation?

The answer to that question lies in what is more important to the people involved in the argument. Is either liberty or security more important?

The only honest way to phrase that argument is to put it in the starkest terms – are we willing to all be slaves so that some of us will have an easier time of it?

The most important aspect of liberty is the presence and enforcement of property rights. You have the right to earn what you can as best as you can. You have the right to do nothing if you choose. You do not have the right to take someone else’s property, or time, because once someone is having their property (or time) unwillingly confiscated for someone else’s good, that person is a slave for the portion of time that it took to earn/build that property.

If you infringe on property rights you have decided that in order to preserve the life and liberty of X, you will violate the life and liberty of Y. And once you go down that road, it means you don’t really care about life or liberty – you just favor X over Y for some reason.

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