Freedom in One Lesson

14.

I Prefer Security to Freedom

Benjamin Franklin once said, “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety” (Franklin 1755). Replacing safety with security and liberty with freedom, the quote would be a great introduction to Leonard Read’s “I Prefer Security to Freedom” (Read 2014a), originally contributed to a 1962 collection edited by the Foundation for Economic Education, Clichés of Socialism. While Franklin asks about what people who give up liberty for safety deserve, Read talks about what they would get. Freedom, he argues, is the path to any security that may be possible.

Are security and freedom mutually exclusive? “Many people wander unwittingly into socialism, gulled by assumptions they have not tested. One popular but misleading assumption is that security and freedom are mutually exclusive alternatives—that to choose one is to forego the other.”

What has America’s experience taught us about security and freedom? “In the United States during the past century, more people achieved greater material security than their ancestors had ever known in any previous society. . . . By reason of unprecedented freedom of choice, unparalleled opportunities, provident living, and the right to the fruits of their own labor—private property—they were able to meet the many exigencies that arise in the course of a lifetime. We think of these enviable, personal achievements as security. But this type of security is not an alternative to freedom; rather, it is an outgrowth of freedom.”

At this point, Read makes a connection to a Ralph Waldo Emerson quote, which he cites frequently in his books (“Cause and effect, means and ends, seed and fruit, cannot be severed; for the effect already blooms in the cause, the end preexists in the means, the fruit in the seed” [Emerson 1841]): “This traditional security stems from freedom as the oak from an acorn. It is not a case of either/or; one without the other is impossible. Freedom sets the stage for all the security available in this uncertain world.”

Next, he insists that we must distinguish the difference between the security that is actually achievable and what progressives mean when they talk about security—a guaranteed life.

Security in its traditional sense, however, is not what the progressives are talking about when they ask, “ Wouldn’t you rather have security than freedom?” They have in mind what Maxwell Anderson called “the guaranteed life.” . . . Under this dispensation, the political apparatus, having nothing at its disposal except the police force, uses this force to take the property of the more well-to-do in order to dispense the loot among the less well-to-do. . . .

Admittedly, this procedure appears to attract millions of our fellow citizens. It relieves them, they assume, of the necessity of looking after themselves; Uncle Sam is standing by with bags of forcibly collected largess.

To the unwary, this looks like a choice between security and freedom. But, in fact, it is the choice between the self-responsibility of a free man or the slave-like security of a ward of the government. Thus, if a person were to say, “I prefer being a ward of the government to exercising the personal practice of freedom,” he would at least be stating the alternatives in correct terms.

In other words, freedom does not sacrifice security but enhances the form of security that is actually achievable for citizens who are responsible for themselves. But choosing security, in the form of a guaranteed life, necessarily sacrifices freedom along with the possibility of other forms of security.

. . . Realize that the ward-of-the-government type of “security” does preclude freedom for all three parties involved. Those from whom their property is taken obviously are denied the freedom to use what they’ve earned from their labor. Secondly, people to whom the property is given— who get something for nothing—are forfeiting the most important reason for living: the freedom to be responsible for oneself. The third party in this setup—the authoritarian who does the taking and the giving—also loses his freedom.

. . . The guaranteed life leads to general insecurity. Whenever government assumes responsibility for the security, welfare, and prosperity of citizens, the costs of government rise. . . . Unless arrested by a change in thinking and in policy, this process leads to all “guarantees” becoming worthless, and a general insecurity follows.

The true and realistic alternatives are insecurity or security. Insecurity must follow the transfer of responsibility from self to others, particularly when transferred to arbitrary and capricious government. Genuine security is a matter of self-responsibility, based on the right to the fruits of one’s own labor and the freedom to trade.

Read then summarizes his main point: “ True security is an outgrowth of freedom, not an alternative to it.” That is why “ being dependent, instead of being independent, is a move away from true security.”