My trek toward liberty through bigger government
Three life stories that challenge libertarian ideals
1. From private school to public school: more freedom
Early one September morning in 1970, our family’s cherry-red Volkswagen microbus pulled up in front of the private school in a suburb north of Boston. Surrounded by Cadillacs and Volvos, I unbuckled my seat belt, hopped down from the passenger seat, said goodbye to my mother, and headed into my first-grade classroom. Although I was delightfully oblivious to the status distinctions represented by the other cars, I did feel constrained.
Every afternoon, the Cadillacs and Volvos would pick up my classmates and take them to homes in ritzier towns a dozen miles away. In class and at recess, these kids and I were building community—and every afternoon it scattered. Although my own neighborhood, less than a mile away, presumably had its own kids that I could play with, I struggled to bond with them because we attended different schools.
Four years later, my family moved to a different suburb, southwest of Boston, and I switched to public school. An immediate difference in daily routines: I walked to school. All my classmates lived within a half-mile. Every afternoon and weekend we organized pickup football, wiffle ball, and basketball games.
It felt freeing to me. I felt more in control over my life, less restricted. I was less dependent on my parents to drive me to friends or activities. I could just wander over to the park by the school, or to my friend Skull’s house, to see if anything interesting was happening.
Of course there were hardships, growing pains, and uncomfortable social dynamics. But I look back on that move to public school as the most significant positive change in my childhood, a sudden expansion of my liberty.
2. From private gyms to public lands: more freedom
On Labor Day, 1990, on a rock-strewn Montana mountainside, I hit a weather trifecta: thunder and lightning on my right, hail sprinkling on top of me, and sunshine streaming onto me from the left. It was my fourth day in my new home. At age 26, I’d quit my urban career, packed my belongings into a red Nissan Sentra, and driven across the country to a place where I had no job or friends.
Mountainsides like this were why: big landscapes, hiking trails, empty spaces and solitude. In Boston, I’d had a nice job, close friends, and an apartment close to the subway that gave me access to all the city had to offer. But I felt constrained by the crowds, the buildings, and the routines. I wanted a life full of massive rock faces, endless pine forests, and enormous skies.
Moving to a small town in the Montana mountains meant giving up intellectual and romantic opportunities, access to museums and culture, and quality vegetables and seafood. But my new home offered dozens of trails on National Forest lands just a mile or two from town. I could go for a hike whenever I wanted: over lunch, before breakfast, or on a long summer evening when the trailhead parking lot was empty.
I loved that public lands gave me the power to do as I wanted, freed from the restrictions that the city imposed on my lifestyle. Not everyone would make such a trade, but the independence that America loves to celebrate is wrapped up in that freedom I had to make a choice unique to my personality.
3. From privately-constrained markets to government regulation: more freedom
In October 2013, I dove into my biggest-ever ghostwriting job, on a tight deadline. I also wrote two magazine articles, did two book-signing events, and negotiated four technical-writing projects. Work was so busy that I barely had time for the most transformative event of the month: registering at a new website called the Health Insurance Marketplace.
I felt pressure to make money, because my then-wife and I were both self-employed with preexisting conditions. Most of our medical costs weren’t covered by insurance, and insurers denied us the option to switch plans. Although sympathetic, my agent predicted that our rates would continue to rise until we simply became uninsurable.
Improbably, I had built a thriving career as a writer-entrepreneur in my remote Montana town. But I was preparing to abandon it because the only way to get health insurance would be to work for a company big enough to offer it. I felt oppressed by the unfairness of this situation. And although a potential solution, “Obamacare,” had passed Congress three years earlier, its survival was so precarious that I felt uncomfortable betting my financial future on it.
Fortunately for me, Obamacare did survive, for the first time providing entrepreneurs like me with a genuine free market for health insurance. Thanks in part to the Health Insurance Marketplace, I’ve been able to control the direction of my life: remaining self-employed, attracting new clients, publishing new books and articles, telling natural stories. It feels like freedom. I can look back on my life so far as marked by these mileposts in a trek toward increasing liberty.
∎ Collective tools for individual journeys
For the past forty years, libertarians led by Charles and the late David Koch have tried to define liberty as absence of government. By their definition, my trek has been away from liberty. I went from private school to public school, from exercising at privately-owned urban gyms to hiking on public lands, from a lightly-regulated health insurance marketplace to a vigorously-regulated one. My life-journey was into a world with a far bigger government presence.
The ancient Greeks conceived liberty as the opposite of slavery, being independent of a master and thus free to live as one likes. Chattel slaves were owned by individuals, though abetted by laws and customers. Only in the 17th century did philosophers such as John Locke become interested in liberty as it related to government—because Locke lived in a time when powerful governments were full of despots and religious zealots. In today’s more complex economy and society, power (and despots and religious zealots) is exerted through many types of institutions. Constraints take many forms.
My own constraints are actually rather bland and complex—because I happen to be a straight white male, with the ridiculous luck to be born into a dominant minority. For many people, constraints on liberty result from private forces, and it’s government actions that free us from oppression.
For example, I now face the biggest step in my ongoing trek toward liberty: retirement. To be free from bosses and clients, I’ll rely on savings, investments—and Social Security and Medicare. My taxes have long supported these programs, with the understanding that sometimes small collective sacrifices can lead to broad advances in individual liberties. It turns out that my quest for liberty is widely shared, and I have been blessed to live in a society that built collective tools to help.
I am currently on a task force for the Office of Public Instruction, and at the beginning of our only in-person meetings in Helena a few weeks ago, we were welcomed by the state superintendent, who asked each of us to introduce ourselves and our "why" for being there. Knowing her hostility to public schools, I took the opportunity to talk about me, my mother, my grandfather, and my children all being a product of Montana public schools and how much I value them.
Excellent article. I relate and agree. Well written and to the point!