We care about freedom from hunger, unemployment and poverty — and, as FDR emphasized, freedom from fear. People with just enough to get by don’t have freedom — they do what they must to survive. And we need to focus on giving more people the freedom to live up to their potential, to flourish and to be creative. An agenda that would increase the number of children growing up in poverty or parents worrying about how they are going to pay for health care — necessary for the most basic freedom, the freedom to live — is not a freedom agenda.

Champions of the neoliberal order, moreover, too often fail to recognize that one person’s freedom is another’s unfreedom — or, as Isaiah Berlin put it, freedom for the wolves has often meant death to the sheep. Freedom to carry a gun may mean death to those who are gunned down in the mass killings that have become an almost daily occurrence in the United States. Freedom not to be vaccinated or wear masks may mean others lose the freedom to live.

There are trade-offs, and trade-offs are the bread and butter of economics. The climate crisis shows that we have not gone far enough in regulating pollution; giving more freedom to corporations to pollute reduces the freedom of the rest of us to live a healthy life — and in the case of those with asthma, even the freedom to live. Freeing bankers from what they claimed to be excessively burdensome regulations put the rest of us at risk of a downturn potentially as bad as the Great Depression of the 1930s when the banking system imploded in 2008.

    • underwire212
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      1 month ago

      Well of course! The only possible discourse we can have about the topic is if we assume capitalism is the best and only political economic model we can have.

    • quindraco
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      1 month ago

      I would lay quite good odds most of the problems you’re laying at the feet of capitalism are caused by GOP socialism, like the article’s discussion of when the GOP just handed the banks gobs of tax dollars in welfare.

      To be clear, I’m attacking the GOP here, not socialism itself. I’m just also tired of people complaining about capitalism while decrying problems caused by corporate welfare.

      • steve_floof
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        1 month ago

        Nah, capitalism is my problem, the thing that automatically segues into dystopia