Liberty

Michael Kinsley has a nice editorial in the WaPo today.

Most of us are not Patrick Henry and would be willing to lose a great deal of freedom to save our lives. It's not even necessarily deplorable. Giving up a certain amount of freedom in exchange for the safety and comfort of civilized society is what government is all about, according to guys like Hobbes and Locke, who influenced the Founding Fathers. And that's good government. Many people live under bad governments that take away more freedom than necessary, and these people choose not to become heroes. That is not a contemptible choice, especially if we're talking France or maybe even China, and not Stalin's Russia or Hitler's Germany. The notion that freedom is indivisible -- if you lose a little you have lost it all; if one person is deprived of liberty then we all are -- is sweet, and useful for indoctrinating children. But it just isn't true.
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Arguing for abstractions while the other side argues for practicality is, to some extent, just a burden that civil libertarians -- or even liberals in general -- will always have to bear. In the old days, liberals at least had the luxury of the easy, tempting argument in the economic sphere -- "here is some money from the government" -- while conservatives were stuck with long-term abstractions such as fiscal responsibility. Now conservatives promise tax cuts starting yesterday and liberals are left defending big government and fiscal responsibility as well.

The good guys need to frame their argument in ways that don't require people to be heroes -- to give up something practical and immediate, such as safety from terrorism, in exchange for an abstraction, such as liberty, especially the liberty of someone else (like a young Arab swept off the streets of Baghdad and locked up in a secret prison).

I disagree with much of what Kinsley writes and believes, but he's a good writer and his opinions are well thought out and clear. This editorial points out the main reason we lose liberty every day, Abstractions vs. Practicalities. Abstractions are hard to get someone to care about when they're trying to solve a specific problem. The main abstraction I see is the law of unintended consequences, but freedom is often considered an abstraction. The Wal-Mart bill from the previous post is an example, as are anti-smoking bills. Kinsley does a good job of pointing out the difficulty liberals (those he's concerned about) and civil libertarians (those I'm concerned about) have to overcome these Abstractions vs. Practicalities.