What does freedom mean?
| By John S. Pinto What does freedom mean to you? Think about it and see what you come up with. Today, it seems to me that we are in a political climate where we have to make a choice between the lesser of two evils. Both John McCain and Barack Obama propose taking away even more of our freedoms. It is all couched in language designed to alleviate our fears by assuring us that their proposals, if enacted, are supposed to make our lives better! McCain’s global warming proposal and Obama’s health proposal are examples. Both McCain and Obama propose to tax us to achieve their ends. Experience teaches us that we will be poorer and neither proposal will work. Arthur C. Brooks, professor of business and government at Syracuse University, has written the book titled, “Gross National Happiness.” He makes the point that happiness has a lot to do with values. The U.S. Declaration of Independence specifically states our God-given right to the pursuit of happiness. Brooks states that happiness is the connection between the Creator and our nation’s destiny. The ability of our citizens to achieve happiness is a measure of the effectiveness and morality of the state. Our political leaders have made the wrong assumption that happiness ensues with our ability to purchase consumer durables and sustain economic growth with full employment and low inflation. The Founders of our country did not talk about these matters because they believed that happiness went deeper. Brooks wanted to be able to articulate which personal lifestyles and public policies would make us the happiest. He used to think that marching to his own beat and making up his values as he went along were the right things to do and that traditional values were irrelevant. He says that his findings surprised him. Brooks finds that the key to happiness is a life that reflects values and practices like faith, hard work, marriage, charity and freedom. In general, he found that religious Americans (those who attend a place of worship every week or more) are much happier than those who rarely or never attend. The connection between faith and happiness holds regardless of one’s religion. Even if religious practices did not include attending each week, faith-based people were much happier than secularists! Contrary to popular opinion, most Americans like or even love their work. This was true all across the job spectrum. The lesson is that in order to be happy, we should work. Married people also were much happier than unmarried people. Marriage is not just associated with happiness — it brings happiness. For some people, happiness increased after marriage and then fell off after a few years. For others, the level remained high for a lifetime. Having children does not appear to raise the level of happiness on its own, but children are part of a pattern of an overall lifestyle of happiness, including marriage and faith. Another happiness predictor is charitable giving. There is strong evidence that giving to worthy causes brings substantial satisfaction to the givers. Even donating blood improves our attitude. The more people give, the more they get out of it. Freedom plays a huge role in our happiness quotient. Freedom and happiness are intimately related. Not all types of freedom are the same in terms of happiness. While economic, political and religious freedom bring happiness, moral freedom — a lack of constraints on behavior — does not bring happiness. The most important issue in the 2004 election was moral values. Brooks finishes by stating that we must hold our leaders accountable when they scoff at and act to abridge our values of faith, hard work, family, charity and freedom. Our happiness and the future of our nation is too important to do anything else. We have fallen into a major trap, whose tentacles have been woven around us since 1936. The trap is that we have slowly given up our freedoms in exchange for government programs that are supposed to cater to the greater good. In reality, government programs, by and large, are designed to keep politicians in power. Political discussion mostly consists of how we punish certain groups of people or how we limit the freedoms of other people. As long as a politician can pit people against each other and as a result get at least 51 percent of the vote, nothing else will matter to him/her. In the United States, we have seen the failure of programs of redistribution and the fiscal crises which they create. Yet our politicians continue to defend and promote them! We should be moving towards free markets and private property rights. History shows us that this is the best (maybe the only) way to improve all of our lives and live as free and happy people. For those of us who emigrated to the United States, it is uncanny to see how traditional values are similar across cultures. The desire for freedom is also universal. I hope that you have had a chance to think about freedom. To me, it is the ability to make choices about your life, even if a particular choice may lead to failure. |
John Pinto's column
