The deep-down truth is that all modern societies are highly complex and interdependent, and therefore every person depends on others in innumerable ways. The way to actually maximize freedom for the greatest number of people is to face that fact squarely, and arrange institutions so that people have the resources necessary to make meaningful choices when possible. American “freedom” is instead about pandering to the entitled, wealthy minority who want to indulge their every whim, no matter the consequences to others or themselves.

Good article, spot on really.

Strict traffic rules are a burden, in the sense that one must obey or pay a hefty price. But they also enable a much freer driving experience.

Rules and regulation as freedom-enabling are anathema to modern American hegemonic ideology, which is fundamentally economic in a neoclassical sense.

The book The Illusion of Free Markets makes a similar point as the article:

True liberty required government organization. In order to achieve cheapness and plenty-the central goals of public economy-it was necessary to calibrate the market. According to this view, police and liberty formed a coherent whole: policing was the prerequisite of bon marche, and bon marche the prerequisite requisite of liberty.

But I’m not going to bother quoting someone Milton Friedman or F.A. Hayek, both of whom argued that government regulation stifles innovation, wastes human energy, and worst of all, led directly to socialism, which they defined as government control of industry, and which was necessarily totalitarian.

The freedom to be a jerk that gets to inconvenience everyone else (or unilaterally involve yourself in a war you nothing to do with) only makes sense if a major component of freedom is being unconstrained. But not having any constraints goes against everything about being a better person in any way. Honing the body is about constraining it to an environment that facilitates its improvement. Honing the mind, similarly, is not the self-directed exploration of conspiracy theories on YouTube. Aristotle’s virtue ethics confines virtuous decisions between excess and deficiency.

But for Americans, all of that is nonsense.