if you give up your freedom for security

Need I mention the works of Marx and Lenin, for example, who provided 'scientific' excuses for the tyranny of such thugs as Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot? There even were many now-forgotten, or now-excused, intellectuals and other influential figures that praised the economic efficiency and progressiveness of Hitler and Mussolini before World War II. Sometimes they are so persuasive that even reasonable people will accept their convoluted arguments. There is a cottage industry among intellectuals who go about creating such justifications for denying people their freedom. Freedom must be limited as a means to good ends, such as the public welfare, prosperity, peace, ethnic unity, or national honor. They will counter by arguing that freedom is desirable, but first people must be made equal, given food to eat, work, and health care. It can only be taken from a people and denied them by force of arms, by power.įor too many intellectuals, however, it is not enough to point out that a people have a right to be free. Freedom, by contrast, is not something others grant you. This right overrules sovereignty, which is granted according to tradition based on a system of international treaties, not natural law. As I showed in Chapter 2, citizens of all countries-a Chinese peasant, a Sudanese Black, a Saudi Arabian woman, or a Burmese Karen, and all six billion other people-have the right to freedom of speech, religion, organization, a fair trial, among other rights, and all these civil and political rights are subsumed by one overarching right to be free. However, this area of international law is still developing, and as we saw in the current examples of Sudan, Burma, North Korea, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia, and China, and one could include Cuba, Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, and Syria, among others, the thugs still largely have their way with their victims. International law now recognizes that if these gangs go to extremes, such as massive ethnic cleansing or genocide, than the international community has a countervailing right to stop them. Nonetheless, they 'govern' by the right of sovereignty: the community of nations explicitly grants them the right by international law to govern a nation when they show that they effectively control the national government, and this right carries with it the promise that other nations will not intervene in their internal affairs. They are like a gang that captures a group of hikers and then does with them what it wills, robbing all, torturing and murdering some because gang members don't like them or they are 'disobedient,' and raping others. The gangs that control these so-called governments oppress whole nations under cover of international law. Given the scientific analyses there I can assert with considerable confidence that freedom is in fact what it appears to be in Table 8.1, and what I have claimed for it in the previous chapters, which is that the freedom of a people is the cause of their greater wealth and prosperity, of human development, and of security from violence. The Appendix to this book tests these and related statistics in various wars to make sure that freedom is, indeed, the factor responsible for greater human security. Here Table 8.1b of Table 8.1 could not be more consistent-the more freedom of a people, the less their deaths due to famine, genocide and mass murder, and international and civil war. There is also the security of knowing that one's life and that of one's loved ones are safe from lethal repression, genocide and mass murder, and deadly famines. There is more to human security than wealth and prosperity.

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If you give up your freedom for security