Today's Understanding Of Liberty And Freedom (Liberty Lite)

Liberty Lite: Exploring the differences and similarities between liberty and freedom

My fellow Patriots,

Let us look to see how liberty and freedom are defined today.

In this mini series, we’ve looked at what the Bible, the American founding fathers, and the leaders of the French Revolution have said about liberty and freedom. Now, let us look at how liberty and freedom are understood today.

There are two major schools of thought when it comes to liberty and freedom today; those is the conservative position and the libertarian position. While there are similarities between many of the political positions of the two sides, there are fundamental differences, especially concerning the definitions of liberty and freedom.

Let us first look at the conservative position on liberty and freedom. Both conservative activist, Charlie Kirk, and Pastor Rob McCoy have talked about liberty, individually and together, and they have come up with a similar idea of what liberty and freedom are. At an event with Charlie Kirk at Calvary Chapel Chino Hill, Pastor Rob McCoy said “Liberty, in a sense, means doing the right thing”, which was a follow up to what Charlie Kirk defined freedom as, saying “Freedom is the freedom to continue to indulge in whatever they want to indulge in however they want…” This follows as definitions of liberty and freedom that are consistent to what we have seen from the Bible, America’s founding fathers, as well as the French Revolution.

What about libertarianism, what do they think to be liberty and freedom? According to David Friedman in his book The Machinery of Freedom from 1973, “The central idea of libertarianism is that people should be permitted to run their own lives as they wish.” Understanding that the root word of “libertarian” is “liberty”, it is clear that libertarians would define liberty as something that is more similar to the historical definition of freedom, than the historical definition of liberty. David Friedman seems to see liberty and freedom as the same principle with the same definition, instead of two principles with different definitions.

So what does the average person do with these definitions and how does the average person define these principles? Looking at Merriam-Webster dictionary would give good insight into that. According to Merriam-Webster liberty is “the quality or state of being free.” This would align with the libertarian definition of liberty and not with the historical or conservative understanding of liberty. I used Merriam-Webster’s dictionary because of how they stay updated on the modern definition of terms, thus reflecting the cultural understanding of words and their meanings. This would mean that in the modern tongue, liberty and freedom are the same thing, with no differences.

In the concluding article for this series, I will look at whether it is a good thing that the historical definitions of liberty and freedom are being done away with and instead being defined as the same thing.