IN a discussion of nullification at the blog economicharmonies, Terry Morris responds to the following statement, which was probably originally made by someone noteworthy, but is of unknown origin:

The measure of a person’s value of liberty is not how much liberty one desires for oneself, but how much liberty one is willing to allow others.

Mr. Morris writes:

[I]t doesn’t strike me as being particularly insightful, nor especially truthful.

Personally I see things quite differently. Instead of the measure of how much value a man places on a given thing being how much of it he is “willing to allow” others to have – the more of it one allows others, the more valuable therefore the thing is to he who allows it (a non-sequitur if I ever saw one) – I tend to come down on the side of the generally applicable principle that the more one is devoted to preserve, protect and defend a thing (the more jealous of it he is, in other words), the more valuable it is to him, whether the thing be liberty, family, the sanctity of traditional marriage, culture, the Constitution and the institutions it establishes, or whatever.

After all, a man ultimately determines the value of his own labor based on a number of variables particular to himself as himself – IQ, knowledge base (education), skill level, experience and so forth. If he “sells himself cheap,” this doesn’t per se mean he’s a bad person, but it does mean he doesn’t think of his labor as being particularly valuable (I mean in a viable economy). Likewise if a man wants, say, a Mercedes as opposed to a Honda (nothing inherently wrong with choosing the Honda, mind you), he’s going to be willing to pay a high price for the Mercedes. But this doesn’t necessarily mean he places much value on the Mercedes. No, the value he places on the Mercedes is more determined by how hard he had to work to get it. Likewise with the Honda. This is where the old adage “easy come, easy go” comes into play. There is a reason that people who win the lottery, for example, tend to wind up worse off than they were before they won the lottery.

The point is, liberty is an extremely precious commodity, more valuable than fine gold or diamonds. Its value is set. Its price has always been the blood of both patriots and tyrants, whether one likes to think about that or not. That hasn’t changed just because we didn’t have to work very hard for what little bit of it we still enjoy as Americans. We, in a sense, won the liberty lottery. And that is why we witness the spectacle of it disappearing before our very eyes – because as a society we don’t place much of a premium on it: “easy come, easy go.”

— Comments —

Carolyn writes:

I really enjoyed reading the comments by Mr. Morris, especially his example of the value of purchases and how they are actually the value of the work involved in earning what is necessary to purchase them. And yes, we have won our liberty as in a lottery, which makes things quite “scary” right now.

I contend the young generation has no concept of earning freedom, or of being without freedom, as well as of many other things that have been handed to them. They also take no time for pondering, are not subjected to good discussions, such as most of us used to have at least once a week in a Sunday sermon, and have trouble recognizing good from evil.

Reading a lot of Abraham Lincoln today…his brilliant thoughts. I doubt many today would take the time to read them, yet they were published and “devoured” by our countrymen of the time.

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