Dark Visions Of "Freedom"

[kpete]

This morning in America's highest court, freedom seems to be less about the absence of constraint than about the absence of shared responsibility, community, or real concern for those who don't want anything so much as healthy children, or to be cared for when they are old. Until today, I couldn't really understand why this case was framed as a discussion of "liberty." This case isn't so much about freedom from government-mandated broccoli or gyms. It's about freedom from our obligations to one another, freedom from the modern world in which we live. It's about the freedom to ignore the injured, walk away from those in peril, to never pick up the phone or eat food that's been inspected.

Read more: http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/#ixzz1qWC550LA

[alcibiades_mystery]

1. A good society balances individual freedom with social obligation

Our society is moving toward eliminating social obligation in favor of a nearly absolutist version of "individual" autonomy- a breed a destructive politics that can't even be properly called anarchism, since anarchism has an actual social factor.

It is, rather, the childish thought of the spoiled three year old. We are becoming a society of Veruca Salts. And we now call this intractable bratiness "freedom." There's no better sign of the complete disgrace into which political thought has fallen once it was completely co-opted by lunatic mafia capitalism.

[LongTomH]

2. "Freedom from our obligations to one another" is what the whole Republican revolution is about!

Ayn Rand's Virtue of Selfishness and Milton Friedman's economics!