How to Organize from The Top To The Bottom: Chapter 12

It is apparent from the last chapter that the most dominant notion of freedom that has taken hold in the United States is the “Freedom to Get Rich.”
America, in this idea, is the land wherein everyone is able to get rich and that former peasants, serfs vassals from Europe could get rich and emulate their former overlords.
This philosophy comes in various stripes where the rich identify government as the overlord whose regulations stifle the “free market, free trade and commerce, all the while being the primary beneficiary of over 250 million dollars in hand outs, subsidies, tax cuts, tax evasions, low wage regulations and that class which pays little or no taxes to that very same government.

Thus, governmental freedom has become confused with economic opportunity, which, as we can see ends up being opportunity for the few to get rich and has little to do with actual freedom.

For the discussion of “actual freedom,”we have to read Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine and other members of the enlightenment Founding Generation.

Enlightenment thinkers created the underlying philosophy of our Declaration of Independence, our Constitution and the Bill of Rights.  

All humans are self-evidently entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, as endowed by their creator and as such are free individuals.

These are the two major strains competing in America; one a philosophy of “free markets” and “get rich” schemes, an economic idea, and this enlightenment notion that spells out ideas about life, liberty, justice and freedom.

We have looked at justice in a prior chapter and we have initially looked at some ideas around freedom. Let’s go into the latter in more detail.

We have looked at “Freedom From’ ideas and “Freedom To” and the notion that freedom is about “Freedom of Movement.” The latter is where society where individuals a confined to a specific locale, no real social mobility, under the thumb of your boss.
By implication we understand incarceration is the opposite of freedom, or confined on a reservation also, as well as creating barriers for the free movement of individuals and labor.

The European Union clearly emphasizes that national borders have been eliminated or reduced, allowing labor to be mobile, note they have a higher standard of living than the United States.
The statement behind this philosophy is that the state does not own its citizens and they are free to move about, change their location, not confined to within specific borders.

But now we turn to another aspect of Freedom.
 
Freedom here is the ability to participate in the polity as indivduals who freely associate with each other.
Freedom becomes the freedom to associate with fellow citizens, from bonds, join unions, remedy the wrongs identified in government. Aligned with ideas around Equality and Justice form the major three ideas which form the basis of Western civilization.

To accomplish these goals each individual must have a means earning a living, a living wage, decent health care, a decent education, the ability to set aside land, and funds for retirement, and a means to translate private ownership back into public wealth for sharing for all.
{See how Alaska does this. It is not complicated. See also my essays on how this can be done.}
All this participation creates the polity, and ownership of our own labor rather than having to sell it to earn a living.
It is the idea that Franklin Delano Roosevelt delineated in his second document on economy. It was his second New Deal.

Summed up, it is wealth for the benefit of the many not the few.

Well how do we exactly get from here to there?
What is to be the mechanism by which we translate the riches of this country to the benefit of all?
 
How exactly do we get this accomplished?

What Are the Alternatives?

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Next time.