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e pluribus unum



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 09/28/2022 12:48PM by Ted King.

All true but I am not sure it is revelatory in any way. Or immediately actionable.

On a side note, I know this was not what you meant by economic freedom, but I was a bit stung by the sentence "We are free to spend our money the way we want as long as we follow the legal economic rules." It touched upon my pet peeve of the US government not allowing me to spend my money by traveling to Cuba. I grew up in Europe and could not imagine that my country would disallow me to travel to another country, even if I want to spend money earned in another place and even if I am a dual citizen. And yet a lot of people do not see this as curtailment of freedoms.

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dk62
I am not sure it is revelatory in any way.

Fair enough. I deleted the post since it probably wasn't worth wasting anyone's time.

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e pluribus unum

It may not have been terribly relevant but I found it interesting.

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Diana
It may not have been terribly relevant but I found it interesting.

Thanks, I have been thinking about all the different aspects of what we think of as freedom and I kind of wanted to see if I could make coherent sense of them. In retrospect I can see the product of that effort as not being revelatory - as dk62 said. He also said it isn't actionable, but I never intended that as a goal - like I said, I was just trying to analyze the meanings of the term "freedom", not proffer a case for certain kinds of action.

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e pluribus unum



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 09/28/2022 07:55PM by Ted King.

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testcase

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e pluribus unum

Sorry to arrive so late, but I read your post and had no complaints about it. I regarded it as a bit of expository thinking aloud. You got a style, and it's welcome, IMHO.

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“There comes a point where we need to stop just pulling people out of the river. We need to go upstream and find out why they’re falling in."

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August West
Sorry to arrive so late, but I read your post and had no complaints about it. I regarded it as a bit of expository thinking aloud. You got a style, and it's welcome, IMHO.

Thanks. Yeah, I intended it to be an explanatory expository essay. I meant to organize thoughts about the nature of freedom and the constraints on freedom and then delve more into the ramifications of the freedom that money gives us and that poor people's lack of money in practical terms means much less freedom for poor people in the totality of their lives. I referred to freedom related to spending money as economic freedom. Right wingers (who usually are relatively well off in the money department) tend to espouse freedom as something liberals want to take away. And when it comes to economic freedom, they are right! Liberals do want to diminish rich people's economic freedom so as to increase the economic freedom of poor people that have very little of it. In a holistic sense, though, liberals aren't taking away economic freedom but rather redistributing it.

What I wrote in the original OP was, as you suggest, pretty much an unpolished draft of an essay that if I were writing it for an academic setting I wouldn't have submitted as is. But I thought it was polished enough for this forum to convey most of what I was hoping to convey.

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e pluribus unum



Edited 4 time(s). Last edit at 09/29/2022 09:48AM by Ted King.