4 Reasons Why Liberty is Vital to Your Life

If you’ve read much of what I’ve written lately, or observed my Tweets on Twitter, especially over the last few days, you’ll quickly learn that liberty is very important to me. It’s a topic for which I have great passion. I am always reading liberty-oriented books, articles, and blog posts. I listen to liberty-oriented podcasts and enter discussions concerning liberty with whoever wishes to explore the benefits and inherent responsibilities of our freedoms. In other words, I think liberty is important.

Why? Let me give you four reasons out of the many I could list and then make a few observations.

1. It is your natural state.

From the time you can barely crawl around your house, you begin exerting your independence. The word “No” is something you hear constantly from your parents, and it is more than likely one of the first words you started speaking yourself. Why? Because independent action and living is our natural state. The desire for freedom and independence resides at the core of our being. Living, to us, means being free to follow our hearts desires. To live any way other than self-directed, is unnatural and has significant negative psychological consequences.

2. Because your life belongs to you.

No one has the right to cause you to act through coercion or force. This is the reason for the establishment of government; to protect each citizen from the use of force or fraud. This is because at root your life is yours to do with as you please. If you wish to be an idiot and waste your life, that is your choice. If you wish to stretch yourself to be the best you can be, that is also your choice.

When the government grasp exceeds its purpose, it then becomes a threat to your life. When the government takes your property, through income taxation for instance, it takes a portion of your life. For it to do so without compensation or accountability or serious control, is the highest form of evil. It has stolen your life (given in trade for your income). Tyranny has many forms other than a military dictator, or king. It can also be in the form of an out of control Congress that uses the threat of jail to enforce laws against the citizens it is supposed to protect while at the same time exempting itself from those very laws.

3. Liberty offers you the best opportunity for personal growth and prosperity.

Liberty allows you to live the very best life you can live. It allows you to live in harmony with your conscience. It allows you to live in accordance with your highest values and to associate with those who reflect those same values.

Liberty allows you to follow your own curiosity. To learn, grow, invent and add value to your own life and to the lives of those around you. It allows you to be active in ways that are positive and healthy. It allows you to benefit from your activities in a number of healthy and good ways.

Certainly liberty can be abused and you can live in ways that are self-destructive, but that is the beauty of liberty. It allows you to choose your direction in life, while at the same time bear the consequences of that direction. A positive direction leads to positive consequences, while a negative direction leads to negative consequences. Your life, your choice, your results.

4. Voluntary exchange between free people benefits all involved.
   

The highest benefit of Liberty is that it raises the standard of living for all free citizens. We’ve seen it again and again. Any society that embraces true liberty vastly improves the lives of their citizens. From new medical advances to improved products and services, Liberty benefits everyone it touches. Those who are free to pursue their curiosity, and develop new ideas add true greatness to their lives. Those who are controlled by social planners and/or politically correct busybodies soon loose any and all desire to improve or add value because they receive no rewards for their actions. True prosperity, not the politically inept version defined by government, can only occur if you are free to pursue your dreams without interference.

To once again achieve true liberty (because we’ve lost so much of it here in the U.S.A.) requires that we once again give it the value it deserves. Liberty is the ultimate value, and too many of us have given it up because it requires vigilance and protection. Over the next several weeks I’m going to be discussing principles of liberty, just how far we’ve gone away from it and what we have to do to revitalize it.

Picture by flicker user Bohman under Creative Commons License. Use of this picture does not constitute an endorsement by Bohman of the ideas in this post.

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