After reading the Honorable Justice Paul Rouleau’s “Report of the Public Inquiry into the 2022 Public Order Emergency,” you may demand a palette cleanser.
Matt Taibbi wrote a full article, “The West’s Betrayal of Freedom.”
I’m going to quote an anarchist.
For both Taibbi and me, Justice Rouleau’s bizarre defense of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s leveraging of emergency powers to freeze truckers’ bank accounts during last year’s lockdown protests leaves a bad taste in the mouth.
If you have a taste for freedom.
Which people in the news media, as well as in government (but do I repeat myself?), decreasingly demonstrate. Mr. Taibbi, reacting to both Rouleau’s report and mainstream journalistic coverage, notes the general tenor of both, which he says read “like all the tsk-tsking editorials in the West you’ve read since Trump, which used every crisis to hype the idea that freedom = danger.”
Rouleau excuses the tyrannical (anti-protest, anti-free-speech, anti-due-process) Canadian government’s attack upon the truckers because it “met a threshold.” You see, “Freedom cannot exist without order.”
But that’s placing the matter downside up. Freedom provides its own order.
It just so often happens to be an order that tyrants don’t like.
Freedom creates order: when neither you nor I infringe upon the other’s sphere of life, that is an epitome of orderliness. Crime and government (but do I repeat myself?) upset that harmony.
“Liberty,” explained P. J. Proudhon, is “not the daughter but the mother of order.”*
When politicians forget that freedom provides the order we need, they make anarchists look good.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* Proudhon, the first major writer to treat “anarchist” as a non-pejorative, was arguably not an Antifa-type anarchist — and the full quotation, presented here on Tuesday, talks about a Republic. Make of that what you will.
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1 reply on “Freedom Isn’t the Danger”
While many people know, from experience, that administration is not sufficient for order, the vast majority cling to the presumption that it is increasingly necessary as society becomes more complex.
We can explain to anyone who will listen exactly why this presumption is mistaken, but we are not well positioned to get people to listen in the first place.
Canadians and Britons are in very great trouble; most other Western nations are positioned for even worse. Because Americans are fortunate enough still to be protected by the Bill of Rights (having dodged a bullet in 2016 thanks to the much maligned Electoral College), some otherwise less liberal members of our population will get to learn from observation more of what are the consequences of abridging liberty of expression in Western nations.
Perhaps, in the face of the dismay of those observers, we can to good effect devote more effort to proper explanation of the deepest problems of illiberal societies.