Let’s Get Rid of Freedom and Replace It with ‘FreeSmart’

Here in America, we’re trained from birth to say we love freedom, but is freedom really what we’re all about? What do you like about freedom, anyway? That you can do whatever you want? Well, what do you want to do? You want to go out to eat? Well, whatever you eat is regulated by the FDA, health inspectors make sure you won’t get sick, and everyone working at the restaurant falls under various laws protecting their jobs and wages.

Do you want to drive? Well, then you certainly need to follow all the regulations specified for government-owned roads while using a government-approved vehicle. Do you want to use some consumer electronics? Those are regulated to make sure their signals don’t interfere with each other, and laws protect you to make sure they aren’t dangerous. And in everything you might do there are lawyers everywhere making sure all are following the rules and working together.

Do you see much freedom there? Maybe not, but then what is freedom? When you boil it down, freedom is people being served rotten food and getting sick and dying. It’s people driving polluting cars the wrong way down a street. It’s consumer goods that kill you while corporations laugh at your misfortune. It’s racist armed militia members not paying social security. It’s polluted lakes and dead baby polar bears. It’s poorly built buildings collapsing on you. It’s homophobic bullies. It’s obese children waddling down the street as they stuff their faces with trans-fats. It’s filthy. It’s chaos. It’s not civilized.

The reality is freedom, in a free market, means that the market wouldn’t stand for someone serving rotten food.

Okay, someone's going to have to do it, so it may as well be me. I'll play Devil's Advocate.

In the deregulated 19th century, you could find anything from grit to chalk powder to dandruff in your bread because bakers would put any old junk into the mix to save on the cost of ingredients. This wasn't because they were scumbags, it's because there was no margin at all on a loaf of bread. In fact, if they'd made a proper loaf WITHOUT cheating, and priced it accordingly, only the upper middle classes would've been able to afford to buy the product. Fast forward to the mid 1990s, and one take-away I used to frequent got closed down for putting greyhound and rottweiler meat in their spicier curries. I suppose the same applies and it's a bit like the rat burger in Demolition Man... if there's a market, and a bit of enterprise, that sort of thing will go on. I've never quite worked out if I should've been outraged when I found out what was actually in the curries, or not, but at the time I just called it like John Spartan: "Tastes pretty good!".

The real question is, how many people would be prepared to put up with that, and how many would whine, "I ordered a chicken korma but this is a kitten korma!". Without food regulation, you have no guaranteed right to expect you get what you ordered.

And you can say a similar thing about medicines. There's a raft of reasons why it takes a billion dollars to put a new cancer drug into hospitals, and one of them is down to some snake oil salesman in the 1930s who fleeced people across America, selling them poison and pretending it was medicine. He got away with it for a few decades. Take the FDA protocols away and many, many new treatments will arrive a lot faster and come in a lot cheaper... but, the trade-off would be, a lot more incidents like this.

According to BBC4 this week, the "liberal do gooders" in the 19th Century, like Charles Kingsley, campaigned against child labor on the basis that kids should work for a living, but be suitably renumberated and not worked to death. It was more the wealthy middle class right wing evangelicals who concocted the notion of the sanctity and innocence of a work-free childhood, and it was those kinds of people who were responsible for campaigning for universal education in the UK. Who'd have thought it - CONSERVATIVES being responsible for the "nanny state" and LIBERALS being responsible for laissez-fair right to work?!

If you're against government intervention, would you roll back the child protection, child labor, child education laws? If any of these are open to debate how far would you want to go? If you're against lowering the Age of Consent for drinking or smoking or marrying, do you return to the Victorian principle of "parents know best"? what about when the parents send their kids up chimneys or into bakers' ovens? Do you want intervention then?

I guess I'm just trying to say, rolling back Big Brother is a very good idea to start from, but there's quite a wide range of views as to what should be rolled back and what shouldn't.

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