Authoritarians love to trot out the liberty/security trade-off in order to justify their criminal acts, as we see almost every day now.They’re keeping us safe, we’re told. We won’t miss that small amount of liberty they’ve taken, we’re told. Well, I think now we can see fairly clearly what happens when government takes all our freedom in one gluttonous bite: 22 million tossed out of work, social unrest at the boiling point, a nation of petty tyrants that are running buck wild over their hapless communities.
There is no trade-off between liberty and security. Our security derives from our liberty. The more secure we are in our rights as citizens, the safer we are. Our liberty protects us from the one institution that poses the greatest threat to our safety: the government. A new virus doesn’t suddenly nullify our rights, but we must assert our right to be free if we ever want to retain those rights and pass them on to our children and grandchildren.
