Ryan Daniel Moran argues that freedom isn't the absence of responsibility but absolute ownership of it. He says accepting responsibility for outcomes in guns, money, and health care preserves freedom, while delegating that responsibility to government transfers control and reduces it.
Why is no one talking about how hard freedom is?
We have this phrase that freedom isn't free. But we always talk about it in the context of war. We never talk about what it looks like in every other area of life or the cost of it and how much it's going to cost us to maintain freedom. See, we have this myth about freedom, that freedom is the absence of responsibility, that somehow not having responsibilities is what constitutes freedom. But the truth is that freedom is absolute ownership of responsibility. That to have absolute freedom, you must take absolute responsibility in everything. Now, we could apply this to the gun debate. We can either be free and responsible or we cannot be free. We can have either one. We can have a debate about how much freedom and how much responsibility we're going to give to certain individuals. But the truth is, if we're going to be free, we have to up our responsibility. This is true in money as well. We like to have conversation about how do we ensure that people are taken care of. But the truth is that as soon as we eliminate people's responsibility, we eliminate their freedom. We eliminate their ability to grow. This is true in health and health care. We can have a debate about how to take care of those who didn't have a shot. But if we remove all responsibility, we have removed all freedom. See, the world is getting more and more abundant. The world is moving faster and faster. There's more opportunity than there ever has been. That makes it confusing. That makes it fast paced. That makes it gives us a desire to hold on to some sort of security. So the temptation is for us to give up some sort of freedom in order for us to get some safety or some security. But what it really requires is for every single one of us to double down on being absolutely responsible for the results that we want to get, for the lives that we want to have, for the difference that we want to make. That's the only way that we maintain freedom. So as we have debates about hard conversations about how we take care of people or how we solve our challenges, the first thing we have to ask is how do we, as individuals and as people take responsibility for this ourselves? Define what it means for ourselves and our families and our communities? Because that's the only way that we're going to maintain our freedom. Otherwise we'll give it away.
But the thing about responsibility is it doesn't go away just because we give it to someone else. If we have someone pass a law for us, if we have a group of men in Washington, D.C. pass restrictions on certain things, or pass subsidies for certain things. That doesn't remove responsibility. It just hands it off to someone who is now taking the responsibility for us. And you may not like how they decide that you are going to live your life. So when we have these hard debates, when we talk about what we are going to have our lives look like and have our societies look like, we have to remember that someone has to take responsibility. And by take responsibility, I mean make intentional decisions about what it's going to be. And you can either do it for yourself, or we can pass that off to a politician or to an entity and pass it off and let them control your life for you. Because we don't get both. We don't get total freedom without responsibility. We can either be free and responsible, or we can be less free. That is the debate that we should be having.
