WHAT IS FREEDOM?

Freedoms may be numbered from four to forty, but these are but branches of the trunk freedom which is unrestricted exchange. Freedom, on the civilized plane, began with exchange and has expanded as exchange has expanded.

 We are free in the degree that we are able to enjoy social intercourse. This enjoyment is measured by our mental and material wealth, which in turn depends upon our productivity, and this depends upon our exchange facility, since we produce for ourselves only indirectly through exchanges with our fellows. Thus exchange is the neck of the bottle of freedom and enjoyments. 

So-called political freedom is negative in that its maximum is attained by the least intervention in our affairs which leaves us free to enlarge our freedom by our cooperative efforts with our fellows. 

This ideal state has never been attained, as the state has always impeded exchange and thus impeded freedom. Constitutional guarantees, in so far as they are effective, are merely restraints upon the state's powers of invasion of human rights. They bring no freedom. They merely undertake to curb the state and leave unimpeded our pursuit of freedom. 

There are no political methods for gaining freedom. To gain freedom, we must invent methods of maximizing our productivity and minimizing our labor expenditure therefore. But it is useless to strive for this, except in so far as we develop our exchange capacity, since it is through the reciprocal action of exchange that production is digested. Our ability to invent methods of labor saving and increasing production has thus far outrun our ability to facilitate exchange. 

This deficiency stands astride our path of progress. All the impediments to exchange spring from the state, for which man in his ignorance of natural laws is to blame. The state's perverseness does not arise from the design of statesmen, but from its receptivity to the schemes of pressure groups and the lack in the minds of its constituency of a true concept of the bounds of proper state activities. 

There is a deep superstition in the citizens' minds that projects the state as the supreme instrument of progress and prosperity, and thus man gives moral support to plans and schemes that subvert both the state and the economy. 

This belief in the efficacy of political intervention in the personal enterprise system, with resultant increasing political perversion and restriction of freedom, is a force running counter to the liberating power of mechanical inventiveness seeking to reduce the labor price of production and enlarge freedom. 

The former has greatly retarded the latter, and, if the trend continues, will gain the ascendancy and reverse the social movement into devolution. 

The danger of this is very real, because as increasing intervention by the state causes greater distortion of personal enterprise, blame falls, not upon the true cause, but upon the seeming malfunctioning of business, the remedy for which is wrongly thought to be greater and greater political control, until dictatorship results. From this false diagnosis of economic maladies spring the so-called ideologies of socialism, communism, fascism, and so forth. No one ever ideologizes personal enterprise; it has no ideology .It is not a way of life; it is the way of life. It is unplanned and springs from the natural impulses of man. 

It is not even necessary that it be understood, because man naturally and instinctively engages in it. But it is necessary to understand what is inimical to it. That which is inimical to it is inimical to freedom. Consider whatever intercourse you may desire with your fellow man, and you will find that it is facilitated or retarded by the extent to which you and he have enjoyed freedom of exchange, even though there be no material exchange in the particular intercourse you visualize. Life is constituted in freedom of intercourse and mutual agreement, and exchange is the touchstone of mutual agreement because it implies satisfaction to both parties. 

Anything that impedes free exchange is a force against harmony and mutuality and an antisocial influence. All political laws controlling exchange limit man's right of untrammeled choice and strike at the very base of his freedom.