There has to have been thousands of books written on the woolly, will o’ the wisp topic of “liberty” over the years, innumerable debates, conflicts fought, wars, and oceans of blood spilled, all in its name. And despite all this, the foundational axiom of liberty is almost painfully simple to grasp. It is essentially this: that every single voluntary interaction, exchange, or instance of cooperation is permitted. All coercive acts are prohibited. All trade, all innovation, all entrepreneurship, every mode of living, every experiment imaginable, is permitted. I think that this is fairly simple to grasp for most people. But understanding only this does little to instill the sense of wonder and hope that this idea has created in all those people who’ve clung to it in the manner of the religious convert, or someone who’s seen the face of God or some similar occurrence. Those people, aside from understanding the foundational concept of liberty, have made the mental leap to using their imagination to envision a future built around this ideal. It’s only once your mind begins, almost of its own volition, to apply this principle of voluntarism to every aspect of the social world does it ignite the imagination, which is essential for the transformative effect to take place, which lights a fire inside the mind of the hapless individual in whom liberty was planted like a seed. Or maybe a time bomb?
All of that is why I believe that, for liberty to truly be achieved in our lifetime(one of many slogans from the Ron Paul era), its acolytes, activists, and prophets must use the power of imagination as their greatest tool. None of those massive treatises matter if we are unable to grasp and communicate in an imaginative way.
To effect liberty, all we need to do is steadily remove the legislative controls that bind us down without our even knowing it. The suppression of voluntary interaction is the greatest, and only true, societal ill, because it lies behind every problem we face. But the only way to effectively communicate this is by capturing the imagination of the public, guiding them to see for themselves, in their mind, what would be possible if only we made the leap.
The ideal of liberty is a real-world philosophy of hope, one that I would call the true “manifest destiny” of our species. Witnessing what we are capable of when we are given even a modicum of freedom is enough evidence to envision what we could accomplish were we free in an absolute sense. I think most people in this country are primed for it. They see now, with their own eyes, what cannabis legalization has accomplished in just two years. All it took was a removal of control, and human ingenuity, imagination, innovation, and entrepreneurship swept in and produced a real-world miracle. A miracle in the true sense of the word, a true revolution. True progress, blindingly rapid progress. This was made possible through simply removing controls that had been in effect for almost a century. Let’s now apply that simple principle to other aspects of our social world. Healthcare, for instance. It is a market currently chained to the ground by a mare’s nest of regulations and prohibitions, all designed to keep the politically-connected fat and rich. We don’t need to arrest anyone, or incite mobs in the street. All we need to do is remove the controls. Just imagine what would be possible.
We vastly underrate our potential as a species. Liberty is the key through what could be described as a dream-door to an unimaginably bright future. We’re ready for it, why not simply walk through?
