It is a sure sign that a person is against freedom when they start trying to redefine it. Even politicians who espouse explicitly anti-liberal and anti-individualistic philosophies feel obliged to pay lip service to freedom from time to time. In The Doctrine of Fascism, for example, Mussolini wrote: ‘In our state the individual is not deprived of freedom. In fact, he has greater liberty than an isolated man, because the state protects him and he is part of the state.’In this view, safety and freedom become one and the same, with true freedom coming from the state shielding its citizens from themselves. In Orwell’s Animal Farm, Squealer assures the animals that Napoleon ‘would be only too happy to let you make your decisions for yourselves. But sometimes you might make the wrong decisions, comrades, and then where should we be?’I have mentioned before the Senate inquiry into the nanny state that is currently underway in Australia. If it does nothing else, it will at least start a dialogue about what it means to be free in a country where paternalism has been on steroids in recent years. Nobody wishes to be seen as being against freedom and yet the ‘public health’ lobby has an endless list of taxes, prohibitions and restrictions which implicitly assume that there is too much of it. The answer, as ever, is to redefine what liberty means.
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