Notes on Reagan and Freedom

Ronald Reagan had an ear for the vocabulary of freedom.

the masses - that's not something we've called ourselves around here

Peter, Paul, and Mary - Don't take away our freedom, please don't take it away.

That's not the way we talk around here.

Can I have the car keys, Daddy? ...Please don't take them away.

Free citizens can't have their freedom taken away.

Who are Peter, Paul, and Mary appealing to? The government?

Do you feel comfortable with a government that leaves us alone because we ask it to leave us alone? If we remain free because the government lends a sympathetic ear to our appeal, we have problems. Free citizens can't have their freedom taken away. They can give it away,

To go back to the example of the car, which represents freedom. The daughter is in the position of the government. It is subservient, not in authority. The daughter obeys her father, who is in charge. The father is in the position of the people, the citizens. He issues instructions and expects them to be followed. So imagine if the father goes to his daughter and appeals to her not to take his car keys away. We'd say that something was wrong in that family. We'd say that a father who makes an appeal like that to his daughter has already lost his freedom and his authority, is no longer in the position he should be in. So it is with citizens in a state. If they make an appeal like that - Don't take away our freedom - they've already lost it.

So is it that serious? Have we reached the point where we think the government grants us freedom, and can therefore take it away? (Remember, the true situation is just the opposite: we grant the government whatever authority it has to act, and we can therefore take that authority away.) Reagan worried that we were headed in that direction. He thought that nothing is so easily lost as freedom, nothing so hard to regain, once lost. A powerful government - it became powerful because the citizens gave it power - can indeed take people's freedom away. But if it was powerful enough to do that, the people were already not free. The taking of freedom is just the last stage of giving it.