Progressivism and Freedom
I have seen repeatedly in the healthcare debate an argument from the left along the lines of “someone who is sick and uninsured isn’t really free”. I always thought that was a bizarre assertion. Well I recently read an article on the Progressive giant, John Dewey and that very formulation played a big role in his thought.
Basically the idea is that the human spirit needs to be nourished for a person to reach their full potential and only when that potential is reached are they really free. You can easily see the next steps from that….and therefore we need XYZ government programs to guarantee nourished spirits and expand human freedom.
This is, of course, complete and utter bunk. It is precisely the kind of sloppiness that permeates the left now. Freedom is not subjective. Yes, there are shades of grey but even the tones are objective.
The Soviets believed they were the heroes of the People. They thought they were nourishing the human spirit by providing the basic necessities of life (and in Soviet Russia they were very basic indeed). So were the Russian people free? Not even a little bit.
Even if you take out the worst oppression from the Soviet model, there’s still a nagging problem with the “freedom through collectivism” model: who decides what you need? If the government’s job is to nourish you and guide you, what if what you want isn’t what the progressive social engineers think you should want? In case it escaped your notice, progressive social engineers don’t tolerate dissent well.
If the model citizen becomes one who let’s the progressives tell him what choices to make, where’s the freedom?