It might be easy for many of us today to get on board with supporting freedom, in the way of personal and social choices for ourselves and others. Most of us value voluntary contracts and voluntary associations in those areas of our lives.
This includes people having the freedom to read what they want, watch or listen to whatever content they want, date whoever they want, be friends with who they would like to, and so on. It's easy to support freedom in this respect for ourselves and others. Yet, where it might be more difficult to embrace that freedom, and an area that might often not be thought of with respect to personal freedom is with economic affairs.
Voluntary associations and contracts should be embraced in all areas of our life.
Once you move to introduce coercion and force into the exchange, then that is when you can greatly increase the potential for more suffering to occur. And while not everyone might subscribe to the mindset of embracing personal freedom for themselves or for others, just like not everyone subscribes to the same parenting approach or diet method etc, that shouldn't be a reason for us not to promote (stand by/hold those values etc) such exchanges if we value voluntary association.
Q: Have you ever heard someone say that they couldn't become a vegan or promote veganism until everyone else in the world also became a vegan? Or that they couldn't adopt some other diet or belief, until billions of others held the same view?
Supporting freedom for ourselves and others in the way of economic freedom includes supporting the right of others to engage in a voluntary exchange without the interference from any other party. And when two parties agree to a voluntary exchange, it's usually because both parties are getting something out of that exchange that they value.
Freedom To Choose
Individual liberty extends not only to the decisions and exchanges that we make in our personal and social lives, it also extends to our economic lives as well. And we can either support the freedom of personal choice for others in this respect, or we can prefer that someone else—
We might be surprised at how it could improve things for the better if more of us opted to embrace freedom not only for ourselves but for others as well, in all of our affairs in life. And if we are only going to embrace the concept of freedom under the conditions that we be first guaranteed that the outcome will in every circumstance always be beneficial, then that isn't a true support of freedom.
Freedom isn't defined by safety.
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