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Freedom Ain't Free: It's $2.57 Trillion Per Year
Freedom
isn’t free, say the realists, the non-naïve grownups who think that the
ideas of anarchy or even libertarianism are fantastic utopian dreams and
nothing more. Well,
utopian they ain’t. My vision of utopia has everyone not ever having to
work, never feeling sad or incompetent, always eating what they want and
never gaining weight, never growing old or unhealthy, and totally
satisfied with everything that life gives them. This, of course, is
impossible, because, if for no other reason, some people can’t seem to
be happy unless other people are unhappy. So utopia is unattainable. Hence
its Greek etymology: utopia literally means “no place” – as in, no
place could exist. That’s why it’s utopia. I
don’t ask for utopia, though it would be nice. I just want to be free. But
freedom isn’t free! You have to fight for it, kill for it, pay taxes for
it and sometimes die for it! This
doesn’t sound like freedom to me. I thought freedom was not having to
fight, kill, pay taxes or die at the behest of some one’s higher good. What
they really mean is that the government
isn’t free, though it’s apparently easy to mix up the two, very
opposite concepts. Well,
how much is “freedom” going to cost us this year? Well, just for
“freedom” on the federal level, assuming – incorrectly – that Bush
won’t add on some supplemental war spending and Congress won’t pile on
additional pork like a glutton piles on extraneous bacon on top of a
ham-pork chop sandwich, federal freedom will cost the American taxpayers
(not including through monetary trickery via the Federal Reserve) $2.57
trillion. Or 2.57 million million dollars. Wow.
That’s a whole lotta freedom! You’d think with that much freedom
we’d be allowed to own the guns we wanted, watch sleazy half-time shows,
smoke marijuana and open a bank without the Fed’s permission. The
freedom we’re being forced to buy seems to be a different name brand
from the kind I’m more familiar with in my thinking. It seems to involve
bribery, persecution, kidnapping, torture and murder. (I wonder if the
“freedom” that we bought for Bribery Some
of the money just goes to people in the form of handouts. A lot of those
on the receiving end would be better off if their money wasn’t taken in
the first place. It would also save paperwork. A
lot of it goes to people who pay less into the system than they get out,
implying that this government freedom is somewhat of a pyramid scheme.
Some of these net recipients are poor; many are not. And
a lot of it goes to the people who administer these programs, or work for
the state generally. All
in all, it looks like we’ve got bribery covered. People who receive loot
from the state seem happy with state “freedom,” and are content with
the idea that freedom ain’t free. After all, for them it’s better than
free: it’s a source of income! (Now, certainly, even most of these
people would be better off if the government pyramid schemed were closed
down.) Persecution
If
it weren’t for the government, how on earth could the market manage to
jail people like Tommy Chong, Martha Stewart, and the hundreds of
thousands of others who are not widely known to have committed crimes
against anyone other than the state? Yes, the persecution element of
freedom isn’t free; it costs tens of billions of dollars a year. There
are more subtle, less expensive, less impressive ways that the state
brings freedom to its people through persecution. If you don’t want to
operate your business according to some bureau in Kidnapping Most
of the kidnapping is done on a local and state level, by public schools
that force children into their buildings and tell them to sit down and
shut up, but only for about eight hours a day, 180 days a year. This whole
process costs something like $10,000 per inmate. Although most of the
funding comes from local sources, we can only guess how much less they
would spend on housing their prisoners without federal assistance, or
whether they would all do so at all. So far, George W. Bush has generously
increased federal education spending by about 50%. A good amount of the
$2.57 trillion for our freedom this year will go to kidnapping, though I
hear that many liberals don’t think it’s enough. Torture Federal
freedom has really taken off in the torture department lately, especially
in places like Murder Well,
let’s see. The federal government has spent hundreds of billions of
dollars a year bringing freedom to Conclusion So
there you have it. Freedom ain’t free, and certainly not the kind the
government provides through its bribery, persecution, kidnapping, torture
and murder. Perhaps if the torture and murder become expensive enough, the
state will have to resort to slavery,
which, as we all know, is the very pinnacle of government freedom. Perish
the thought. It might seem an expensive price to pay for freedom, but you
get what you pay for. I’d say for all the bribery, persecution,
kidnapping, torture, and murder we get, $2.57 trillion seems about right.
discuss
this column in the forum Anthony Gregory is a writer and musician living in Berkeley, California. He earned his bachelor’s degree in history at UC Berkeley, where he was president of the Cal Libertarians. He is a research assistant at the Independent Institute, a policy advisor for The Future of Freedom Foundation, a guest editor of Strike The Root, and a contributor to Rational Review, LewRockwell.com, Antiwar.com, The Libertarian Enterprise, and Liberty Magazine. See his webpage, AnthonyGregory.com.
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