Tag Archives: freedom

World wide, wearing masks prevented millions of hospitalizations and saved hundreds of thousands of lives. When vaccines became widely available, they prevented millions of hospitalizations and saved hundreds of thousands of lives. Both could have saved many more lives, prevented many more hospitalizations but for opposition to masking and vaccination. So why were so many Americans opposed to the requiring of wearing masks and vaccination? “An...

So does labor fulfill freedom or create alienation? Likewise, does technology emancipate and fulfill us, or does it enthrall and disempower us? Marx's answer to the first question is that it does both, depending on the social relations within which it is defined, managed, and controlled. It would seem that we can answer the second question for ourselves, in much the same terms. Technology both extends freedom and constricts it.... Adding to what David Little says in this post, Hegel and...

Milton Friedman was wrong. Capitalism doesn't foster freedom — it produces autocratic workplaces and tyrannical billionaires.... Another paradox of liberalism that arises from economic liberalism and affects social and political liberalism, too.JacobinCapitalist Freedom Is a Farce Rob Larson

Singapore has had an even more "draconian" (from the US perspective) social policy than China for many years. Ever hear of it in the US media that trumpet the "Singapore miracle"?The fact is that Asians are traditionally much more social than Americans, who are the most highly individualistic people in the world. One nation's "liberty" is another's "license." This is also the case internally in the US, and it is one factor in the extreme divisiveness that the US is now experiencing socially...

Frank Li begins up many interesting points and, in my view, gets a lot right in this post. It is worth considering in that it is comparison of systems by a person that knows both the Chinese and American. But Li omits some of the key Western thinking about the philosophical basis of liberalism, which distinguishes individuality from personhood.  A dilemma arises between individuality and personhood. On one hand, individuality is unique and varied and all individuals are clearly not...

A majority of the American public believe that the U.S. government engages in widespread monitoring of its own citizens and worry that the U.S. government could be invading their own privacy. The Monmouth University Poll also finds a large bipartisan majority who feel that national policy is being manipulated or directed by a “Deep State” of unelected government officials. Americans of color on the center and left and NRA members on the right are among those most worried about the reach of...

Whitehead founded The Rutherford Institute to preserve and defend human rights and civil liberties in a non-partisan way. He issues a stark warning to Americans. Unless we can learn to live together as brothers and sisters and fellow citizens, we will perish as tools and prisoners of the American police state. CounterpunchAmerica Breaks Down: The Anatomy of a National Psychosis John W. Whitehead | President, The Rutherford Institute

By John F. Henry Levy Economics Institute On January 6, 1941, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt delivered his State of the Union Address to Congress. It was a perilous stage in world history, and Roosevelt used his annual address to urge U.S. entry into the war then raging. Against the isolationists in Congress (and in the general population), Roosevelt contended that the main objective of U.S. entry was to fight for the universal freedoms that all peoples of the world should possess....