On Liberty

In recent years, the world has witnessed a troubling shift towards authoritarianism disguised as justice. Governments across continents have justified sweeping restrictions on liberty by falsely appealing to fairness, equality, or collective welfare. 

In the East, China has perfected a system of monitoring every transaction and movement, using a facade of social order to erase individual autonomy. The state used force to placate its citizens into passive compliance, and these authoritarian impulses are spread beyond illiberal regimes. The West is no exception. 

European nations have begun to increasingly criminalize dissenting opinions. The United Kingdom doubled down on “offensive” or “harmful” speech, particularly concerning anti-monarchy, republican sentiment. Similarly, the principles of Liberté, égalité, fraternité have escaped the French government, as they seek to suppress voices critical of government policies. Furthermore, the Australian government has followed a similar path by recently banning social media for children—setting the precedent for government intrusion into familial relationships and autonomy. 

In defense of authoritarian trends, the nations’ governments often claim to uphold justice. 20th century philosopher John Rawls famously asserted in A Theory of Justice that “Justice is the first virtue of social institutions.” He proposes a hypothetical “original position,” in which individuals design a society behind a “veil of ignorance,” unaware of their own social status, wealth, or talents. Since no one knows their advantageous or disadvantageous status, Rawl contends that people would seek equal, basic liberties and allow inequalities only when they benefit the least advantaged members of society. Justice, in this conception, is conceived as a

patterned equilibrium and form of unethical redistribution.

But prioritizing justice over all other virtues is problematic. By defining justice as fairness, systems and institutions are meant to adjust and recalibrate outcomes to resolve any inequalities. And in attempting to preserve fairness through continuous change, systems tend to override the spontaneity of free will and reduce individuals to variables in biopolitical calculus. The resultant product is a system which cannot tolerate human freedom and becomes an intrusive bureaucratic mechanism that constrains the very autonomy of individuals it purports to honor. Furthermore, the theory has been weaponized by the expansive state to justify coercive interventions into the private sphere through the creation of arbitrary government regulation to promote a false conception of fairness. Although Rawls, himself, did acknowledge liberty’s importance, his philosophical architecture places liberty in a position of vulnerability. The rights he defends are framed too narrowly, confined to a limited sphere of political participation and conscience, while leaving economic and personal autonomy exposed to his concept of flawed redistributionist demands. Once fairness is treated and applied as the overriding principle, liberty outside the “basic structure” is perpetually at risk. Liberty may lead to equality but equality is not a necessary condition for liberty as Rawls supposes. The theory breaks down because rights that are restricted to a narrow domain cannot withstand the weight of patterned justice. 

Liberty is the foundational value of institutions. Justice, equality, and welfare are only meaningful when individuals possess the freedom to pursue them. The very idea of justice presupposes that individuals can act, deliberate, and enter into relations voluntarily. The nature of these relations can be seen in the freedom to form friendships, enter into marriage, establish contracts, exchange goods in the marketplace, or join associations of shared interests and beliefs. Without liberty, justice is indistinguishable from coercion. 

It is precisely the capacity for self-determination that allows human beings to ascribe value to their actions. To act freely is to act under one’s own judgement and under the capacity of pure practical reason. If an action is compelled by an external force, then the action cannot be evaluated, because morality must presuppose responsibility, and responsibility necessitates the freedom of deliberation amongst one’s self. Liberty must therefore be a priority over justice because it is the enabling ontological condition for all other values to exist in a meaningful sense. And when individuals are denied autonomy, coerced equality becomes indistinguishable from tyranny, for both systems treat persons as malleable and passive objects. The only genuine response to tyranny is resistance individually, for it is the rights of individuals being violated, but fought collectively, for protective associations will form under the banner of liberty.

The birth of the United States of America was itself a radical assertion of liberty and rejection of the paternalistic authority of the British monarchy. The American Revolution was based upon the conviction that the right to pursue one’s own ends is the natural right of man and the indispensable foundation of legitimate government. The Declaration of Independence enshrined this principle by affirming that all men are endowed with unalienable rights, that among these “...are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” The decisive break from European tradition of hierarchical rule, which forced subjects into a state of passive receptance, etched the importance of freedom and autonomy into the minds of the American colonists. The people became the authors of their political destiny and constructed the basis of institutions to safeguard liberty against both external domination and internal tyranny. 

This radical experimentation in liberty formed and became the defining feature of the American identity and set the nation apart from the monarchies and collectivist traditions of Europe. Nowhere can patriotic identity be more explicitly seen than the symbolisms of freedom and liberty that organically emerged alongside these institutional safeguards. The Gadsden flag, designed during the American Revolution, with its coiled rattlesnake and the uncompromising motto of “DONT TREAD ON ME,” came to represent vigilance and defiance against overexerting authority. Correspondingly, the Liberty Bell and the State of Liberty were made enduring emblems of the nation’s commitment to supporting individual freedoms through the creation of a vast system of rights and sociopolitical institutions.

Among the most enduring legacies of this feverous revolutionary commitment to liberty was the codification of amendments that guaranteed the individual’s sovereignty against both state intrusion and collective coercion. The Constitution, though a pragmatic compromise between differing thoughts, brought upon a fundamental charter of freedom designed to limit the scope of governmental power and enshrine the sovereignty of the individual. Furthermore, the separation of powers, the system of checks and balances, and the enumeration of rights in the Bill of Rights were drafted to serve as safeguards against the encroachment of authority. Alongside these rights, sociopolitical institutions such as the judiciary, local law enforcement, and a civilian-controlled militia were structured to preserve order and serve individual sovereignty rather than subsuming it. Economically, this framework of negative liberty undoubtedly culminates in the system of economic freedom and free enterprise, capitalism, which should not be willfully nor morally constrained by the government. 

 The country’s emphasis on liberty extends beyond social and political systems, but is also seen in capitalism. Among the institutions that have remained in the western political thought, none has been more controversial, contested, and maligned than the system of free exchange. Capitalism is the most misunderstood institution, demanding a rigorous defense under the provisions of negative liberty that we have metaphysically justified through deductive reasoning. It is the institutional embodiment of autonomy and the extension of autonomy into the sphere of economic production, exchange, and innovation. If individuals are restricted from trading freely, they are denied exercising their negative right to restructure property through voluntary exchange, a right that is inseparable from the right to be free from interference. To defend capitalism is therefore to defend liberty itself, for without the freedom to contract and to trade unrestricted, the political rights enshrined in any system purporting liberty remain hollow.

Capitalism has also secured the material condition that makes liberty sustainable by promoting innovation, rewarding initiative, and generating prosperity unmatched by any centrally planned economy. The strength of capitalism lies in the way prices arise from countless voluntary monetary exchanges which reflect scarcity, preference, and opportunity cost in a matter no bureaucracy can replicate. These signals guide capitalism toward the most valued ends, while profit and loss provide continuous feedback that corrects inefficiencies and channels creativity into the creation of products. Accordingly, due to the decentralization of decision-making, authority is prevented from consolidating in the hands of a bureaucratic elite, ensuring that individual freedom is maintained.

The critics of capitalism often argue that it produces inequality, fosters exploitation, and generates externalities such as environmental harm. However, inequality of outcome is not a defect but a natural result of freedom, for individuals differ in talents, ambition, and preferences. 

Socialism and communism, despite their rhetorical appeals to fairness and equality, ultimately collapse under the weight of their own contradictions. Both systems lessen liberty to redistribution and treat individuals as instruments of collective planning. Socialism’s insistence on redistribution transforms society into a system where outcomes are engineered by the coercive state rather than earned. In practice, this often results in individuals becoming dependent on government welfare as a permanent condition, leaving them vulnerable to the policies of the very authority that claims to protect them. 

Communism intensifies this dynamic by abolishing private property altogether, stripping individuals of their fundamental right of autonomy and responsibility. The promise of equality devolves into a concentration of power in the hands of a pseudo-state, a structure that emerges when all labor and resources are collectivized under communal ownership. In such a system, the individual ceases to be a self-directed agent and instead becomes a mere component of a vast apparatus of production. This biopolitical pseudo-state thrives on the conformity of individuals and demands that citizens submit their identities to the collective will. 

An empirical analysis reveals that socialism and communism have demonstrated their inability to sustain prosperity or liberty. Socialist experiments such as Venezuela in the twenty-first century, once among Latin America’s wealthiest regions, collapsed into hyperinflation and food shortages under the leadership of Nicolas Maduro, whose nationalization of industries destroyed productivity. Similarly, socialist economies in Eastern Europe consistently lagged behind capitalist counterparts, plagued by inefficiencies and chronic shortages. Moreover, communism’s record is significantly more devastating. The Soviet Union, despite vast resources, endured decades of stagnation and ultimately collapsed under the weight of socioeconomic pressure. Meanwhile, Maoist China’s Great Leap Forward produced one of history’s deadliest famines and killed tens of millions through forced collectivization and failed central planning.

Against the failures of the redistributionist systems, the alternative lies in a minimal state that secures liberty without overreaching into the private sphere. Robert Nozick articulated this conception in his defense of the “night-watchman” state, a government restricted to the narrow functions necessary for safeguarding liberty. His entitlement theory reinforces this vision by grounding justice not in pattern distributions but in legitimate holdings where individuals are entitled to property if it is acquired fairly, transferred voluntarily, or rectified justly. As such, the Nozickan state affirms that people have inviolable negative rights that cannot be overridden for the sake of state-sponsored social engineering. Additionally, by limiting its scope to the enforcement of contracts, the protection of rights, and the maintenance of order, the state preserves the conditions under which individuals can freely pursue their own ends and flourish themselves. 

Yet the defense of liberty cannot rely solely on theory, rather, it requires the active resistance to authoritarian trends that threaten to erode autonomy in practice. Citizens must remain vigilant against governments that disguise coercion as fairness, whether through surveillance, censorship, or paternalistic regulation. Ultimately, resistance, formed through voluntary association of agents, must require both individual courage and collective assistance. Just as the American Revolution was born from a refusal to submit to a controlling authority, modern societies must cultivate a defiance against overreaching power. As Patrick Henry famously remarked in his speech to the Second Virginia Convention on March 23rd, 1775, “Give me liberty or give me death!”