In Ethics: The Big Questions, an anthology of essays on moral issues, James P. Sterba argues that there is no meaningful difference between negative liberty and positive liberty.

Depending on who is doing the defining, negative liberty is a freedom from interference or obligation. Positive liberty is liberty which is obtained at the expense of others, usually without their consent.

In an entertaining attempt at Newspeak, Sterba attempts to frame socialist wealth redistribution as a negative liberty.

What is at stake is the liberty of the poor not to be interfered with in taking from the surplus possessions of the rich what is necessary to satisfy their basic needs. Needless to say, libertarians would want to deny that the poor have this liberty. But how could they justify such a denial? As this liberty of the poor has been specified, it is not a positive right to receive something, but a negative right of non-interference.

If we forced a productive member of society to go to work, telling him that over half his wages were going to a welfare recipient, we would all agree that the welfare recipient is a beneficiary of positive liberty. But what if we did not tell the productive worker that we were going to take his wages, and after he returned home from a hard day at work, we simply requested that he not interfere with any welfare recipients who drop by and happen to empty his wallet – would this be any different?

Whether the obligation we place on the productive worker happens after the earning, or before the earning, the liberty provided to the welfare recipient was still at the expense of the worker. That would make it a positive liberty.

Today I read an all-too-typical blog post. Nothing unique about it. Just the same old collectivist whining about “freedom” not being enough.

Our friend Richard Chappell, who wants us to know that he is currently studying at Princeton, offered this critique of the libertarian perspective:

There’s much that’s misleading in politics. But perhaps the worst offender is the common claim that Right-wing “libertarians” (e.g. ACT) champion the value of individual freedom. They stand for non-interference, but this “negative freedom” is only half the story. The more important aspect of freedom is opportunity.

Imagine you find yourself stuck down a well. Libertarians claim that you are perfectly free so long as everybody else leaves you alone, since that way you suffer no interference. But surely we can see that this is mistaken. If left alone, you would dwindle and die. That’s not any sort of freedom worth having. Real freedom requires that you be rescued from the well. Until that happens, you lack any opportunities to act and achieve your goals. And that is clearly what really matters.

Of course, most of us aren’t stuck down wells. But the example proves an important point. If you agree that the person stuck down the well lacks freedom, then you are committed to the view that freedom requires more than mere non-interference, for they suffer no lack of that!

For a more politically relevant example, consider the consequences of poverty. It is not enough to leave poor children alone: by letting them starve, we do not thereby make them “free” in any worthwhile sense. The fulfillment of basic needs is a prerequisite to any form of freedom worth having.

First off, we must mourn the man down the well. He died a horrific death. He remained down in that hole for a total of three months. Hundreds of villages visited him daily, so he wasn’t exactly lonely; but they all refused to help him out. You see, the man in the hole lived in a collectivist state. In a collectivist state, common daily morality is assigned to the government.

Several times during his stay in the hole, villages brought ropes and ladders to help him out. They were all rebuffed, “it is the role of the government to help him out. That is why we force people to pay taxes, because the government, and only the government, is qualified to help out people. The thousands upon thousands of people we keep in prison for not paying taxes – they would be sincerely offended if their incarceration was in vain.”

So he sat there. Waiting. Eventually, the villagers were prohibited from bringing him food. After all, only a government can effectively feed people who have no food.

But the government never came. The villagers called 911, but the line was busy. Evidently, emergency services was short-handed, due to the government giving trillions of dollars to foreign governments (which ended up in the hands of dictators), the National Endowment for the Arts (millionaire Robert Mapplethorpe was certainly more of a worthy cause then some proletariat down a well) and a Government Health Care scheme that is the single biggest money maker for organized crime in America – fraud estimated at $35 billion a year.

Yes, he died a painful death. One citizen suggested that helping him was a human obligation, a “moral obligation” and not a governmental one. More reasonable minds prevailed, however, and they have risen up to demand higher taxation to fund a new 911 call center.

The resultant increase in taxes will put 2% of small business out of business the first year, and is estimated to result in 300,000 jobs being moved overseas. Tax related convictions are expected to increase by 5%. Oddly enough, the majority of tax evaders are former Barack “Tax ‘Em Till They Bleed” Obama’s cabinet picks.

And if this wasn’t good enough of a response to Mr Chappell’s silly argument, I’ll post an actual argument tomorrow.