How do you think of freedom? Perhaps you think of it as the absence of restriction. I think conservatives frequently define it to say the government is not regulating us. The free market is free from government regulation, you see. This negative definition is good as far as it goes, and perhaps the only way it makes sense when a politician talks of freedom.

However, freedom can be positively defined as the ability to fulfill your God-given roles in life, or more simply, the ability to do what is right. (These thoughts are not original with me, in case you are wondering; I’m just blogging off the top o’ me head.)

For example, think of an alcoholic with $20. He could have the first type of freedom by having no restrictions on him from his family or community, and with that freedom he could drink himself into stupor. While he would be free to drink all the whiskey he can afford, he would not be free from the whiskey’s bondage over him, and he would not be free from the turmoil or doubt that lead him to drink in the first place. How can he find that positive freedom? How can he gain the ability to what is right when he has sold himself into an alcoholic bondage?

He needs community. In a sense, he needs less negative freedom in order to obtain more positive freedom. It really does take a village to raise a child, but that village is family, church, and small community, not federal or state government. We may think of ourselves as autonomous individuals, but we actually act within a social context. We rebel against real or perceived restrictions. We align ourselves with teams or labels because we want to be part of that group, and we want that group to win, generally speaking.

And in the long run, don’t we want to be right? When we make our choices, don’t we want them to succeed, for them to be correct choices whatever that means? That works in community, first with the Lord who made us, next with our family biological or spiritual, and then with our larger community. The ability to do with is right is the upside of freedom.

Happy Fourth of July.

Oh, I want me one of these.

Thomas Sowell argues that proponents of government medical insurance use a lot of marketing language and make few arguments.

A cynic is said to be someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. If so, then it is political cynicism to point to other countries that spend less on medical care, including some countries where there is “universal health care” provided “free” by their governments.

…

There are more than four times as many Magnetic Resonance Imaging units (MRIs) per capita in the United States as in Britain or Canada, where there are government-run medical systems. There are more than twice as many CT scanners per capita in the United States as in Canada and more than four times as many per capita as in Britain.

Is it surprising that such things cost money?

I was surprised and irritated when I heard the president say he could cut wasteful spending in Medicare by eliminating unneeded tests like MRIs and CT scans. The scans he said were wasteful were those that came back negative. So if a problem wasn’t found, the test was a waste of time?

The real solution to this is to put all the decision making in the hands of doctors, patients, and Christian neighbors who would be willing to help people pay for the care they need.

With Independence Day coming this weekend, I want to share a bit of history I just read in David Elton Trueblood’s 1973 book on Abraham Lincoln. In a chapter on Lincoln’s habits of prayer, Trueblood reports:

The fact that the prayers of the North and South obviously conflicted lent credence to a story in which President Lincoln took unusual delight. According to the common version of the story, two Quaker women, riding together on the train, began to compare the two Presidents.

“I think,” said the first, “Jefferson will succeed.”

“Why does thee think so?”

“Because Jefferson is a praying man.”

“And so is Abraham a praying man.”

“Yes, but the Lord will think Abraham is joking.”

Of this, Lincoln said that it was the best story about himself that he had ever “read in the papers.”