What would you have me do? — Freedom

"The excesses are not abnormalities but are exactly how we would expect unregulated markets to work, especially when capital has the law and politics on its side. Monopolies can charge a high price when consumers (once known as patients) do not react or when they move to another provider, and thus an unconscious roadside casualty is the perfect victim. In retrospect it is not so surprising that free markets, or at least free markets with a government that permits and encourages by the rich, should produce not equality but an extractive elite that predates on the population at large. Utopian rhetoric about freedom has led to an unjust social dystopia, not for the first time. Free markets with rent seekers are not he same as competitive markets; indeed, they are often exactly the opposite."

"The individual who tries to plot his position by reference to our society finds no fixed points, but only the vaunted absence of them, "freedom" and "opportunity"; freedom for what, opportunity to do what, is nowhere indicated. The only positive he is given is "get and spend" ("get and spend—if you can" from the Right, "get and spend—you deserve it" from the Left) and he did not need society to tell him that."

"Berdyaev makes an important distinction between two senses of the world freedom, between freedom as a means and freedom as an end. By the first we mean freedom to direct ones own life, to choose between good and evil as one understands them; by the second the freedom which consists in liberation from ones lower nature for the service of what is highest and best. As Berdyaev puts it, we mean by one and the same word "either that initial and irrational liberty which is prior to good and evil and determines their choice, or else that intelligent freedom which is our final liberty in truth and goodness."

"Marx regards labor - working with the material world - as the primary domain in which we should realize our freedom in autonomously realizing ourselves as individuals, as members of the human species, and as in community with others. When we can fully identify with the product and process of labor, its consequences for self and others, when there is mutual recognition and affirmation of the value of these consequences - that the workers have satisfied others needs for the others sakes, and the others manifest their appreciation of that fact - and all of this is freely willed, then labor is unalienated, and hence free. Failure of any of these conditions entails that we are engaged in alienated labor. Alienated labor is labor that we cant identify with or affirm as an expression of our autonomy. It is unfree labor."

"The odd thing about freedom is how, at the extreme, it comes to resemble its opposite. Think of gridlock on the freeway: everybody free to drive but nobody able to move."

"We cant impose freedom, but we can eliminate roadblocks to freedom, and to allow free societies to develop."