Freedom as it Exists Today - Essay Example

? Scholars agree that democracy began around 500 B.C.E. in Athens. Other contributing origins to the current American system of democracy include theMagna Carta, Renaissance humanism, and the Mayflower Compact. The Magna Carta is a document that nobles forced King John to sign limiting his powers and forming a parliament to keep the king in check. The Magna Carta serves as the basis for English citizen's rights and, eventually, for American citizens’ rights (Alchin, 2006). Renaissance humanism looked to classical Greece to generate secularism, advocate personal independence, individual expression, the right of each person to enjoy such freedoms, and also the free market system the U.S. purportedly operates under today. “Expansion of trade, growth of prosperity and luxury, and widening social contacts generated interest in worldly pleasures, in spite of formal allegiance to ascetic Christian doctrine. Men thus affected—the humanists—welcomed classical writers who revealed similar social values and secular attitudes” (Kreis, 2008). While the Mayflower Compact did not reallly foreshadow the Constitution or the Bill of Rights, it did serve as an agreement between those on the Mayflower that in the absence of an official charter from the King, they would govern democratically. It “embod[ied] the guiding and lasting principles of the Pilgrims as expressed by their pastor John Robinson: separation of Church and state in a ‘civil body politic’ and the rule of ‘just and equal laws’” (Pilgrim Hall Museum, 2005).  These three influences remain evident in today’s version of American democracy, although many of the loudest detractors rail against secularism and separation of church and state, individual freedoms have been diminished, and free trade is no longer the economic system even though many American citizens do not know of these changes nor do they care. They are blissful in their ignorance, and have conceded any power to those voices shouting propaganda to keep them in their current ignorant state. Democracy does not look the same as it did in 1620. Self-professed Christians do not believe everyone should have the right to worship in their own manner. They believe their version of religion should be taught in schools regardless of its intellectual merit and foisted on American citizens for their own spiriual good. Renaissance humanism has become so much a part of the consciousness of people in Western societies, that the idea of someone telling them how they should worhip never even occurs to them. Many people who live in the United States also never consider the priveleges of living in a democracy, the ability to have equal say in how the government is run. In fact, people in the United States have become so accustomed to the notion of democracy, many do not even participate in it. That is, they do not exercise their right to vote, which is the privilege of democracy, having an equal voice in what laws are passed and who will represent citizens in government. Even worse, according to Frances Fox Piven is “the sheer complexity of our economic and political system [that] makes democratic choice and deliberation difficult if not impossible. Democratic possibilities depend crucially on the ability of the public to understand what is happening to our society and why, and especially on the ability of the public to decipher the role of government policies (Howard, 2011, p. 68). Each session of the congresses result in more laws that the average citizen may not understand or even have knowledge of. The candidates for office are chosen on their ability to pay for their campaign and not so much on their fitness for office or their ideas. These people with lots of money pass laws favoring their own kind and cloak it in propaganda that fools the gullible electorate into believing it is for their welfare. When and if the people who were fooled into voting for it find out they have been duped, it is too late. Is it any wonder that many do not vote? They do not know what they are voting for, and even if they do, they feel tricked by people they trusted enough to vote into office. Those who would promote their political agenda realize how ignorant and apathetic the masses truly are. They engage in a campaign of propaganda that confuses citizens who mistake the information they hear as facts. Take the birther movement for example. How many times does the president need to prove that he was born in the United States? Yet a good portion of the citizenry believes Donald Trump who insists the president has something to hide. “Confronted by complex and powerful social changes they do not fully understand, much of the U.S. citizenry is vulnerable to political hucksters proffering simplistic, distorted, and self-serving ‘explanations’ of key issues of national importance,” Matthew Howard claims. “A case in point would be former President George W. Bush's efforts to capitalize on the blank space in American democracy by leading the United States into war with Iraq on the basis of an organized disinformation campaign, accompanied by a disturbing level of media complicity” (Howard, 2011, p. 68). There are still American citizens who insist that one day the weapons of mass destruction will be found somewhere in Iraq. It is these same citizens who demand smaller government, but are appalled at the idea of having their Medicare or Social Security benefits cut. They do not know how the government works and they do not have the intellectual ambition to find out. In the early days of this American democratic experiment some believed as a system of equality, all must participate. Others predicted problems. Alexis de Tocqueville, a French political thinker, visited America and wrote a book, Democracy in America, about democracy’s effect. “Tocqueville’s great fear is political somnolence, which might yield a body of citizens too drowsy to see danger coming and too sleepy to take any action to prevent the loss of their freedom and the crushing of their souls” (Levin, 2008, p. 144). Many believe that Tocqueville’s warning went unheeded as the Patriot Act was passed after September 11, 2001 under the guise of protection. Meanwhile Vice President Cheney kept the masses in fear with daily color readings of the terror alert system. “’Despotism,’ [Tocqueville] tells us, ‘often presents itself as the mender of all ills suffered; it is the support of good law, the sustainer of the oppressed, and the founder of order” (Levin, 2008, p. 144). Has anyone forgotten President George W. Bush saying, “We cannot let the terrorists achieve the objective of frightening our nation to the point where we don't conduct business, where people don't shop” (Bush, 2001)? The administration made sure the citizenry was kept scared. Not only that, here was the President of the United States telling its citizens, not to rally around the flag, make sacrifices, or any of the other sorts of admonitions war-time presidents of the past have said. No, President Bush told the nation to go shopping. Unfortunately, people did and they forgot about what was going on in Afghanistan, in congress, and on Wall Street. To be fair though, the general ennui of the populace resulted in little thought to how the country is governed or what was happening in the markets. By shopping, the citizens of the United States showed Al-Qaeda, the terrorist group behind the attacks, that they were not terrorized. The system of free market capitalism and a free society are a great scourge of evil to Al-Qaeda that they believe should be wiped from the face of the earth. These groups feel that the free enterprise system has no moral virtues and that it allows anything and everything as long as it is good for business. Many who are not enemies of the United States would argue that the free enterprise system has no morals. Mark A. Zupan says, “Free markets are superior at promoting integrity and other cooperative virtues as well as prosperity” (Zupan, 2011, p. 172). Zupan’s argument is that in a free market people must encounter each other and transact business repeatedly. Therefore, they must treat each other fairly, with integrity, which Zupan says is “not about good or bad, or right or wrong, or what should or should not be." Rather, integrity boils down to honoring one's word” (Zupan, 2011, p. 173). If a business person repeatedly and deliberately breaks his/her promises, then word gets around. What it boils down to is the golden rule of business: “Do unto others, as you can get away with and still maintain a working relationship.” People who want to do business must treat each other with this type of integrity, says Zupan, which obliquely constitutes morality. J.R. Clark and Dwight Lee do not even try to pretend that business has any semblance of morality, not even Zupan’s skewed version. Clark and Lee concede that business has no morals, but they claim no one else does either. They “recognize[e] that the superiority of markets is the result of their ability to generate desirable outcomes without relying on what is widely seen as moral behavior. . . . markets are essential for decent and humane social order because they can be substituted for the morality of caring that is necessary for decent and humane relationships” (Clark & Lee, 2011, p. 2). Considering the way the markets and the free market system has so badly damaged the economy of the United States and the world, appropriated retirement funds, foreclosed on millions of homes leaving their inhabitants with nowhere to live, and wreaked havoc on employment numbers, Clark and Lee have some nerve claiming that the free market system substitutes for decent and humane relationships. Right now, most people see anything to do with the free market as anything but moral. One appalling aspect of this alleged morality of the market is the propaganda supporters spew. Right wing conservatives have raked President Obama over the coals for his health care plan alleging that it limits the freedom of individuals to decide if they want health care. What Obama’s health care plan really does is limit the ability of the so-called moral free market to gouge sick people and once their insurance is exhausted, refuse to cover them. Obama’s health care plan ended that “morality” from the health care business. Another of the complaints was that Obama’s healthcare plan would regulate health care industries so that they could not compete globally. Robert Field points out that “while the health care system in the United States claims the largest share of private sector involvement of any in the industrialized world, this market-based structure emerged from a series of government programs that launched its key sectors and that continue to shape it” (Field, 2011, p. 1671). Without government intervention in health care, those who have made millions from the industry might be struggling without the infrastructure of government programs. When free market advocates talk about how the market alone brings wealth and integrity to people’s lives, they leave out one important ingredient and that is government. Along with government, of course, comes regulation. Without it, those who own the businesses would control the world. After the last round of deregulation, those with most of the money do own most of the world. The rest work for them, or do not work because these “job creators” that the conservatives say should not have to pay taxes are not hiring. It does not matter if people on whose backs they climbed to get to the top of the pile are now unemployed and without a pension because those on Wall Street gambled the pension away. It does not matter that people have lost their homes because the market was not regulated enough to protect mortgages against big bank shenanigans. None of that matters as long as those with the money can keep generating the propaganda that keeps them in power, unregulated and free to do as they will. The only problem is that that freedom was supposed to extend to us all. References Alchin, L. (2006, September 20). Magna Carte 1215. Retrieved December 7, 2011, from Middle-ages.org: http://www.middle-ages.org.uk/magna-carta.htm Bush, G. W. (2001, September 20). Address to Congress. Washington D. C. Clark, J. R., & Lee, D. R. (2011). Markets and Morality. Cato Journal , 31 (1), 1-26. Field, R. I. (2011). Government as the Crucible for Free Market Health Care: Regulation, Reimbursement, and Reform. University of Pennsylvania Law Review , 159, 1669-1726. Howard, M. O. (2011). Social Researchers, Right-Wing Demagogues, and the "Blank Space" in American Democracy. Social Work Research , 35 (2), 67-70. Kreis, S. (2008, November 7). Renaissance Humanism. Retrieved December 7, 2011, from The History Guide: Lectures on Modern European Intellectual History: http://www.historyguide.org/intellect/humanism.html Levin, Y. (2008). Democracy and Human Nature; Lawler and Tocqueville on the Modern Individual. Perspectives on Political Science , 37 (3), 142-146. Pilgrim Hall Museum. (2005, May 18). The Mayflower Compact, 1620. Retrieved December 7, 2011, from Pilgrim Hall Museum: http://www.pilgrimhall.org/compcon.htm Zupan, M. A. (2011). The Virtues of Free Markets. Cato Journal , 31 (2), 171-198. Read More