Why Americans really don't value liberty

Liberty is an American ideal. It motivated the move towards independence from Great Britain. It also animated the thrust to win the Civil War and extend its benefits to others who had been denied them. Even in political and social discussions today, we hear the word used to justify all sorts of actions, behaviors, or political positions.

But the reality is that we have long abandoned any real allegiance to the notion of real, genuine, personal liberty. The start of this movement away from liberty began in earnest in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries with the rise of the progressive movement. This political ideology began to reject the notion that allowing individuals the ability to make their own choices in every area of their lives led to a better society.

Indeed, progressives were advocates of extensive social planning (it's intellectual elite favored eugenics among other activities to create the "perfect" human society). It's primary tenet was the primacy of "society" over the individual. Leaders of progressive thought openly supported communist ideology in Russia as well as the National Socialists (Nazis) in Germany. In their opinion, society could no longer be entrusted to the individual decisions made by it's individual members. Planning, form "enlightened" central planners, was needed to curb the "excesses" of liberty.

While the extremes of progressive thought could not be achieved in the U.S. to the extent it was in Russia or

Germany, much of it certainly took root in the U.S. over the course of the 20th Century. At the local, state, and national levels, bureaucratic agencies of all sorts sprung up to manage liberty's extremes.

Where this notion particularly gained traction was in those areas of decision making that were perceived to be (and in many cases genuinely were) born out of ignorance, hatred, or separatism. In short, our perception changed from allowing individuals to make any decision they chose and reap the rewards or suffer the consequences of those decisions, to using the law to ensure people only made whatever "society" believed were good decisions.

This coercive approach to try to guarantee good decisions has continued to spread from what some would consider the most baneful of decisions (refusing service someone of another race, religion, or sex) in the mid-20th Century, to now attempting to prevent even some of the most mundane and personal decisions (whether to purchase soft drinks or health insurance). These sort of regulations are, of course, always artfully presented as ways to improve some aspect of "society."

Quite frankly, this is not a totally new phenomenon within the United States. Whether it was slavery or the subjugation of women, the Alien & Sedition Acts, the Japanese interment camps of World War II, or current debates over the ability of people to freely choose who they will choose as a spouse, another American tradition has been to attempt to deny the very liberty those in control want for themselves to others in society - always in the name of "protecting society."

The fundamental problem with liberty is that is is messy. True liberty allows people to make all sorts of decisions, even bad decisions, that others don't necessarily agree with. Yet, the enduring legacy of the progressive movement is that we have all, at some level, bought into the notion that "planned" arrangements are always better than spontaneously generating ones. At the beginning of the 21st Century, Americans simply are intolerant of "messiness" - i.e., liberty.

We see this play out in all areas of life in modern America. Home education scares those in public schools

because "who is in control?" We have planning commissions in all major cities to make sure that growth is "sustainable" and according to the best interests of the community. We pass laws mandating how much employers must pay their employees, as well as laws that tell employees the minimum they are allowed to work for. And we mandate individuals engage in commerce for governmental purposes or to ensure some sense of social values.  We even have governments at all levels attempting to control how much of which types of foods or drinks individuals can choose to consume.

What we don't realize is that as we attempt to legislate away the ability to make bad decisions, we eventually get to the point that we also legislate away to make good decisions as well. Taking away someone's ability to be a complete jerk leads to taking away someone's ability to be a complete saint. There simply is no getting around this trade-off.

The ability to make good decisions and bad decisions is a necessary prerequisite for liberty to exist. But we are quickly rejecting the notion that people should be allowed to make their own decisions, especially if we believe those decisions to be wrong. Hence the use of the law to force "good" decisions. Liberty is messy and we live in a world that no longer tolerates messiness.

I don't know that this course can be altered. But I do know it will have consequences beyond what most of us can foresee or understand. True liberty simply doesn't seem to be a genuine American value any longer.