The One and Only Practical Means To Freedom (Today)

July 5, 2013 by Liberty

This is a topic that many liberty supporters have trouble accepting. It’s a topic that’s often avoided because of how uncomfortable it makes them feel about their own lives. While anyone can preach that they live a free life, not everyone can actually do it while remaining on the outside of a jail cell. Of course, everyone submits to certain things voluntarily but there are a number of things that the average person does that they’d rather not do.

You cannot be free while you rely on someone else for your income to survive. You cannot be free while you don’t have the resources to move your location significantly and quickly. This is a huge amount of resources for most people. The cost has probably never been higher. To get a decent citizenship in a short period of time you need at least $100,000. Most people don’t even have the money to make the flight to a new country.

I hate to say this but, in today’s world, money is freedom.

That’s not as bad as it seems though…

The Good News

Money is not a bad thing. Money is a way that people transmit value from one person to another. Considering money from that perspective, freedom is the value that you receive from the work that you produce.

While this still probably doesn’t sound too peachy, history had much worse cases. It use to be the strongest of the tribe was the free one. People were only as free as the control they could physically enforce. Today, people can at least buy their safety through hard work (in most cases.)

Money Can Buy Freedom

Even the most idiotic of politicians respect money. Quite frankly, virtually anything that someone is willing to pay for can get passed by politicians in office. Despite what they want you to think, money is the deciding factor for most government decisions.

That means that anyone that can produce the money has the power and freedom.

In bad situations, money can purchase legal protection. Competent legal protection has repeatedly shown that it’s capable of keeping innocent men from going to prison. Naturally, if someone is willing to pay enough, a lawyer can find facts that make conviction impossible with the millions of pages of legal rules and regulations.

If you were to not have money you probably wouldn’t have had the money to hire a lawyer in the first place. (The difference between public defenders and real lawyers is ridiculous.)

In the worst situations, money can buy a new protection racket. While I may never be able to disappear into a foreign country safely, people with money could. Governments like funding. Governments are willing to compete to earn money for themselves. That means the rich always have a second option for escape.

Break The Depressing Cycle

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While we don’t hear about this very often, the world is significantly better than it was one-hundred years ago. Despite all the horrible regulation in place, the world is still standing and people barely need to work for bare minimum survival (even without government subsidies.) Fast food employees can afford to have mobile phones and laptops. Most of the population can afford a car. These are major life improvements when compared to years ago. They’re also forms of freedom.

Technology is the way that freedom spreads to more people.

Imagine how much it would have cost to send a message across the world only a few hundred years ago. People would have spent a fortune on the level of communication that the average person has today. Technology consistently does this (cars bring food, computers bring emergency notifications, sanitary restrooms reduce germs).

Bitcoins are one of my favorite new examples of the power of technology. Think about the freedoms given to drug dealers or any other person that wants the government out of their business. No one can connect the wallet with the person without major resources. It’s possible that cryptocurrencies will do more for the liberty movement than every single previous accomplishment in history by completely shutting governments out. (It is unlikely but still possible.)

I need to ask this…

What has activism done?

Naturally, the true results are invisible because there is no way to know who got educated and what they did with it.

People have this perception that education is the key to a liberty-minded world but it’s not. Action is the key. You can educate everyone in the world. Everyone could even agree with the philosophy. That doesn’t matter if people aren’t willing to stand up and believe in the free market by acting.

Your Turn

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There is only one way to convince the world that liberty is the means to freedom and that’s with proof. Forget about activism. That shouldn’t be your goal. If activism is your goal then you might as well be preaching the importance of not smoking while puffing on a cigarette. Your goal needs to be the most motivating factor in a free market: PROFIT.

It’s not dirty to try to profit. Many free market supporters still get a creeping feeling when they consider trying to make money. In the free market, you want to make money.

Money is the value that you produce for the world. If you don’t have enough money, one of two things is happening: Either you’re not asking what you’re worth or you’re not producing something of value to people.

Think about the beauty of all this.

When you produce value, you profit, and improve the freedom for everyone in the world.

When you make a profit, you also earn proportionally more freedom for yourself.

Forget about activism. I love you liberty thinkers and I know that you can do amazing things. You can have your cake and eat it too. Earn freedom for yourself and everyone else by using the free market.