Would you call the freedom to choose whether or not to wear a helmet or a seat belt an "essential" liberty? I wouldn't...
Would you call the freedom to drive a vehicle an "essential" liberty? I would...
When Ben Franklin lived, they didn't have motorcycles, or cars. Times have changed.
Indeed they have, -- and by about 1950 or so, we had plenty of reasonable regulations on how to deal with motor vehicles on public highways. Since then we've gone berserk with over-regulating every aspect of the issue, much to the detriment of our liberty, with little effect on our safety. Ben was right.
If you take Franklin's words literally, then people who are willing to go through screening at the airport in order to board a commercial airplane don't deserve liberty or safety. But I think it's worth it to have to empty your pockets and take off your shoes if it will help prevent another 9/11.
Dream on that the silly airport games are making it 'safe' to fly. -- Or that seatbelt/helmet laws make it safer to drive. -- You cannot live a free life in safety.
Yet you would have promoted requiring strapping folks on their horses and having them wear helmets, for safety of course, because folks fell off their horses then. They in turn would have told you that it was a matter of essential Liberty, tarred and feathered your butt and sent you packin' out on a rail.
With all due respect, we're not talking about "an essential freedom" versus another "essential freedom." Note there is no article "an" in the quote. If you'll forgive me for answering your post with another quotation to further illustrate my point:
Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the Government’s purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.
-- Justice Louis Brandeis