Taking it further, it's worth asking if we're talking about:

1. Freedom TO or

2. Freedom FROM?

Both are valid in discussions of freedom, but I find the west tends to focus considerably more on #1 than #2.

This wording isn't as useful as it comes across at first, as the issue itself is often two-sided. Steve Jobs--one of the defining users of these phrases in tech--saying that it is important to exert his puritan values on everyone to provide a "freedom from" porn by normalizing taking away someone else's "freedom to" install whatever they want is also him exerting what he feels should be his "freedom to" build centralized cryptographic locks and take away many peoples' "freedom from" authoritarians, whether here or in China. The west, for numerous reasons, tends to focus a lot on "freedom from" such control, and it happens to manifest as a "freedom to" do things, but a "freedom to" do something is always commensurate with a "freedom from" the constant intrusion of the people who insist that you can't. GPL software guarantees me both a "freedom to" do things with it, but it's moral purpose is to ensure "freedom from" all the shitty things developers can do to me if I don't have those guarantees. At the end of the day, I feel this linguistic contrivance is maybe useful if you've never before realized the world is made up of tradeoffs between multiple interests, but then it starts to lose its usefulness once people try to apply it as a shortcut for how to analyze or judge morality.

I feel like we can simplify this: Alice's freedom to do something is in conflict with Bob's freedom from Alice doing it to him.

And then we're back to "you should have the freedom to do anything that doesn't harm someone else" and people get to argue forever about what counts as harm.

> Positive rights of course directly imply slavery so it makes sense people wish to frame them as negative rights.

I think you're probably a better person than this.

Hmm, let me explain and then you can be the judge of that.

All rights that a person possesses implies obligations that everyone else must meet. For example, if I have the right to not be assaulted, that implies the obligation of others to not assault me. The difference between a negative and positive right is that the obligation for a negative right is inaction, but for a positive right it's action.

If you're forced to act in a specific way, you're robbed of your agency and ownership of yourself. What else would you call that?

Are you able to understand the difference between taxes and slavery? If you can, try your hand at explaining why taxes and slavery are different. I'm am not merely asking rhetorically; I'm serious. It's a worthwhile exercise because it reveals something about your underlying model of the world.

Well, I suppose we should define what we mean by "slavery" first because one could simply argue they aren't the same by definition. If it's something like "someone captured, sold, or born into chattel slavery", than obviously a tax payer is not a slave.

But under a loser definition, it's fairly obvious that an entity which takes part of the results of your labor under the threat of violence at least partially owns you, and thus it's reasonable to consider tax payers as slaves to their government.

I'm actually more interested in your argument for why they are mutually exclusive concepts.

> But under a loser definition, it's fairly obvious that an entity which takes part of the results of your labor under the threat of violence at least partially owns you, and thus it's reasonable to consider tax payers as slaves to their government.

This is the difference between what I might call philosophical, or perhaps semantic, and practical discussions.

We can define slavery to mean anything we want, up to and including being born. Every human has to eat and breathe to survive, does that mean they're slaves in that way? Sure? Maybe? Who cares.

The practical discussion is how we want to live our actual lives and structure our actual systems of power.

When people talk about "positive rights" (and really, all rights) they are aspirational. Merely creating a law does not change reality. We can create all the laws we want saying that people should not be murdered, but people will in fact, still be murdered, even though it is now against the law.

Similarly we can create a law saying that people should have healthcare access or food, but people will still be unable to see a doctor or get food when they need it. Neither of those laws imply putting anyone into slavery.

At a practical level, human life is better when we band together in larger and larger groups and contribute to the common welfare, however you want to phrase that.

We can, of course, quibble over the size and type of those contributions and how we use them, thats how society should work, but it is incredible bad faith to accuse people who want to use those contributions for, say, healthcare access, of wanting to enslave people.

Well yeah, thats a problem with debates, if people are using different definitions then you end up talking around each other. I don't think the definition I use is unreasonable though. Slavery is fundamentally a matter of self-ownership, and taxation robs you of such self-ownership. Requiring resources to survive doesn't rob one of their own self ownership. Neither does working for a salary, although "wage slave" gets thrown around without much opposition to the term...

Anyways, rights exist a priori, regardless of the capacity for any power to enforce said rights. Negative rights don't actually require enforcement because they aren't coercive. Implying rights don't exist because people violate them doesn't make sense, it's irrelevant.

Think through your example about the doctor. If you (a doctor) and I are stranded on an island and I break my leg, the "right to healthcare" would imply that you are obligated to help me, and I have the moral right to coerce you (violently if required) to help me. Would you agree to this proposition?

Now of course most people who hold these beliefs haven't given it any thought beyond "I want people to be safe happy and healthy". But those who have, realise coercive violence is a base requirement and are fine with it, but obviously won't frame their beliefs in that way.

You keep attempting to shift terms to mean something they do not.

> Anyways, rights exist a priori, regardless of the capacity for any power to enforce said rights. Negative rights don't actually require enforcement because they aren't coercive

Prove it.

> Think through your example about the doctor. If you (a doctor) and I are stranded on an island and I break my leg, the "right to healthcare" would imply that you are obligated to help me, and I have the moral right to coerce you (violently if required) to help me. Would you agree to this proposition?

This a fantasy you've created by deliberately using the wrong definition of the words involved.

The "right to healthcare" means that your government should do its best to make sure people can see doctors and receive healthcare related treatment when they need it.

> you keep attempting to shift terms to mean something they do not.

> The "right to healthcare" means that your government should do its best to make sure people can see doctors and receive healthcare related treatment when they need it.

Yeah ok. I'm gonna bow out of this discussion now, since you're just accusing me of doing what you're in fact doing.

Like I said, you can use whatever definitions you want, but this is what everyone else means. You can disagree with reality all you want, but you won't become correct.

How exactly does the right to food "imply slavery"?

Where does the food come from that you have the right to?

It's the opposite and highly different across the western world, with America mostly focusing on 2 and Europe obsessed with 1

I have no understanding of the "freedom to ..." and "freedom from ..." phrases that would align with your claim about America.

"Freedom from..." is generally used to form phrases like "Freedom from hunger", "Freedom from homelessness", "Freedom from being thrown in the back of an unmarked black van by unmarked people wearing masks". I don't know what version of America you've experienced, but the one I know absolutely does not focus on this notion of "freedom from".

Yeah, look at the state of our freedom of religion. Conservative Christians love to push the idea that religious freedom includes the right to legislate from scripture, but honestly, it feels like people should know better.

People tend to think that when you get the government involved with something you are passionate about, that passion will now influence the government. Still, the reality is that you're handing control over that passion to the government.

This is how a "Christian America" would play out. Whatever beliefs are held by those in power would be written into law, despite the actual opinions of America's Christians. The government would declare itself an authority over Christianity and would start telling churches how to operate.

This was already partially true in red states before marriage equality (and probably still true today, to some extent). Progressive churches that believed same-sex marriages were holy in the eyes of God were told by the state that they could not perform same sex marriages - in some cases, even barring a pure non-binding ceremony as a form of "attempted marital fraud".

If you are an American Christian and you care about your right to worship freely without government interference, you should cherish secularism. Enforcing the Bible as a matter of law means that interpretations of the Bible you disagree with will be enforced against you. Requiring prayer in schools will lead to vicious fights between teachers and parents over which prayers are the "correct" ones. Literally any piece of scripture you write into law will become controversial even amongst Christians. But still, people insist that their freedom would somehow be enhanced.

And this doesn't even touch on the fact that a Christian America would turn non-Christians, especially Muslims and Jews, into a lower class of citizens.

It is unfortunate that he current powers controlling all branches of our government are primarily interested in taking rights away, and that those who voted for it think that this is freedom.

I mean I'm a Christian and want a secular government but this current administration is the farthest thing from a Christian administration in the history of the United States. Donald Trump is like the first non practicing self identified Christian in US history.

By and large many issues in America today are due to have abandoned Christian norms on both ends of the political spectrum.

Freedom from interference. Hunger is not of human origin, thus no human can guarantee you freedom from hunger. This is a religious desire. On the other hand, humans can guarantee their own non interference

No we cannot because such things require restricting the freedom of others and you yourself cannot feed the world. However you can commit to not interfering in the lives of all eight billion people. It's actually really easy if you put your mind to it . These two things (feeding the world v not interfering) are things of two different categories

the fact that "I, myself" cannot feed the world does not prevent me being a part of systems that can.

i put much less priority on "not interfering" than you, perhaps because i'm a priviledged white anglo middle class dude, or perhaps because i believe different things about the world than you. such as: there's always interfering, it cannot be escaped, it can only be shaped.

The term "free market" originally referred much more to freedom from government or ruler-controlled markets than it did to the behavior of actors with a market.

A free market in that sense is one in which (more or less) anyone can sell (more or less) anything at (more or less) any price. Historically, the freedom to do this was impeded by laws and/or arbitrary rule making, even if today monopolies, monopsonies and rent-seeking are a bigger problem in many markets.

A free market simply means that individuals are free to conduct consensual transactions with others. In other words, they aren't compelled through violence or the threat thereof, to make or not make transactions that they otherwise would.

Generally speaking, what all other definitions boil down to is Sam and Hanna wanting to make a consensual transaction, and some third party who has nothing to do with said transition interfering "for the greater good" or whatever. Which is nonsense, it's the complete opposite of freedom.

> A 'free market' means freedom from monopolistic and rent-seeking practices (according to a Marxist).

This is also the position of Adam Smith and, for that matter, everybody except for the monopolists and their sycophants.

I think the latter are sometimes referred to as the Chicago School and someone should really buy that place out to split it up and sell it for parts. I bet they have some nice buildings that are worth way more than any of their theories.

> Yet we have a different capitalist take on what a 'free market' is, which is more like a choice between Pepsi, Coca Cola and own-brand cola, with plain old tap water not on the menu.

Let's not ignore the third thing here. There are actual economists who will make arguments like "monopolies are efficient because of economies of scale" -- all empirical evidence to the contrary -- and presumably actually believe them. But there are also, you know, monopolies, and government officials in their pockets, who say things like that knowing that they're full of crap because that mendacity has been lucrative for them.

And maybe we need to start putting those people out on their butts or into a prison cell.

Why are you (apparently) calling Milton Friedman a sycophant of monopolists? Here's a Friedman quote, shortened to keep it on topic:

"A government which maintained law and order, defined property rights, [long list of other functions of government,] engaged in activities to counter technical monopolies and to overcome neighborhood effects widely regarded as sufficiently important to justify government intervention, and which [something about welfare]—such a government would clearly have important functions to perform. The consistent liberal is not an anarchist."

Obviously he didn't like regulation at all, and was probably struggling to decide how much of it to tolerate, but that doesn't mean he wanted monopolies.

I was thinking more of Scalia than Friedman, but let's go there for a minute too.

Probably nobody wants monopolies except for monopolies; the question is what do you do about them? And the Chicago School answer is something like, have more free trade and fewer regulations so that markets are more competitive.

The problem with this is that it isn't robust against selective implementation.

We get "free trade" where international corporations get access to US capital markets in order to fund the creation of vertically integrated global supply chains that offshore jobs and consolidate the global economy into a small number of companies and countries, but we don't get "free trade" where US consumers can feasibly use a foreign bank or payment processor if the US ones have consolidated and captured the regulators, or where foreign doctors have a practical path to immigrate to the US and practice medicine.

We get "fewer regulations" where giant corporations successfully lobby to get rid of laws that are inconvenient to giant corporations (like Glass–Steagall), but not "fewer regulations" where there are still a zillion regulations that impact small companies more than large ones and make it more difficult to start a new business or compete with existing incumbents. I mean, why is DMCA 1201 still on the books? Its nominal purpose was a fraud from day one and the only thing anybody really uses it for in practice is to lock out competitors.

You thereby accumulate a bunch of consolidated markets that you need to promptly smash into tiny pieces with the antitrust hammer or you're in a losing battle against time where they lobby to accumulate even more rules that benefit the incumbents faster than anybody else can accomplish getting rid of them.

And I know I'm criticizing the implementation rather than the theory here, i.e. Scalia rather than Friedman again, but for a theory to be good it's kind of important that it be amenable to practical implementation.

But for that you need the theory to actually specify -- in bright letters on the front page, not in a footnote somewhere -- that the most important part is that the regulations you get rid of first are the ones that limit competition, not the ones that defend against consolidated incumbents. Because otherwise the consolidated incumbents will point to your theory to argue for doing the opposite, which is what happened.