Here is why I am skeptical when today’s conservatives talk about freedom. Tea Party adherents have stressed freedom as an issue in modern American life, even more than traditional conservatives. They are willing to go beyond the politics of conventional Republicans to get the freedom they demand. They use the symbols of our American Revolution to emphasize their commitment to a revolutionary view of freedom.
Freedom from what? It turns out that freedom from taxes is not only what today’s libertarian-conservatives talk about most, but it’s also all they care about. Taxes and the deficit, taxes and unemployment, taxes and recovery from the recession – lower taxes are the answer to everything. Even if that were true, are lower taxes the meaning of freedom?
Republicans have been attacking government as hard as they can since they lost Congress and the Presidency. But behind their rhetoric that freedom from government is what cutting taxes means is a whole set of policies of bigger, badder government. Government intrusion into our private lives is bad, unless it asks whether you are gay. Government attempts to influence our health care is bad, unless you would like to get a legal abortion. Federal government imposing itself on local governments is bad, unless it is for preventing local gun laws.
What is freedom? Isn’t freedom more than having a low tax rate? Doesn’t freedom mean the ability to direct our own lives, to influence the big decisions that affect our families, our workplaces, and our communities?
Freedom has always been a slippery and contested idea in America. The founders created wondrous documents about freedom, which have been quoted for over 200 years around the world, but denied their idea of freedom to more than half of Americans.
At that time, freedom meant mainly freedom from government, the kind of government that the founders knew from Europe. They could not have imagined the global power of big business that has developed since then. Americans have fought for and won freedoms from the power of big business to force them to work 14-hour days, to pollute our rivers, to discriminate in pay and hiring against Americans they didn’t like, to create monopolies, to put poisons in our food. As many conservatives are so fond of saying, “freedom isn’t free”. But conservatives now say they are unwilling to pay for those freedoms, through the government agencies which protect us. Fortunately, these freedoms turn out to be important enough that Americans always, in every poll, say they are willing to pay.
One of the most important American freedoms is freedom to operate in the free market. This is not an issue for millionaires, but for average American workers. Freedom to work at good jobs with a living wage and some vacation time. Freedom from abusive bosses. Freedom from discrimination in the workplace, based on race or religion or sex or sexuality. Freedom to participate in workplace decisions.
These freedoms have not been granted by grateful employers to the workers who make their businesses run. They had to be won through decades of struggle, on the job and at the ballot box. They could only have been achieved through collective action, through worker solidarity, organized in unions. Those freedoms are just as important for public sector workers as for those in the private sector. Governments as employers have committed the same workplace abuses as private companies.
Republican politicians see their chance to take those freedoms away from our neighbors who do the people’s work as teachers, policemen, firefighters, and garbage collectors. Americans will gain nothing if the public service workers’ unions are broken. Workplace freedoms are not free, but the savings that taxpayers could get from eliminating collective bargaining for public service unions are minuscule compared to the losses we will see in the services we use every day.
Their freedoms are our American freedoms. Let’s not sell them for a few bucks.
Steve Hochstadt
Jacksonville IL
Published in the Jacksonville Journal-Courier, March 8, 2011
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