The other day I went to buy water and I found out that they had raised the price, it seems that all the local water distributors made a pact to raise the price to the same amount, leaving consumers without options and basically acting as a monopoly. I was talking about this the other day, and someone told me that these are the kind of problems that go unsolved in a free market, that in theory a cheaper alternative should come up soon, but in practice it doesn't end up happening because people usually end up succumbing, agreeing to pay an unnecessarily high price because they have no other option. My response to that was that, in my view, freedom, in all its forms, has both positive and negative effects, depending on who is free. If you give complete freedom to the kindest of men, you will see how freedom becomes the most precious good and has the most phenomenal results, so that a society made up only of men like this would undoubtedly become the most perfect society that could be thought, but if, on the contrary, you give complete freedom to the most corrupt man, we would be astonished to see freedom being used no more than to engender the most dirty and reprehensible actions and to commit all kinds of perversities, being that a society of only such men would occupy its rightful place among the most wretched and unfortunate societies.
What determines whether freedom is good or bad is nothing but the virtue in the minds and hearts of men. If free men use their freedom to take advantage of their fellow men and to earn one's own benefit at the expense of others, such men will bring ruin, and a society dominated by these men will inevitably be doomed. Such a society will fail, but not because of the freedom that these men possess, but because of their wickedness, because evil rots and corrupts everything it touches, and nothing can be left intact without shattering it. Freedom will only be, and only is, a tool, so to speak, which in the hands of the good man becomes the most useful for everything, and in the hands of the wrong man they become the most sinister artifact.
Total freedom can be both the most beneficial and the most harmful. It is not true that freedom alone will solve all evils, it takes a little more than that, it takes virtue, it takes goodness in people's hearts, because all social ills are produced by corruption and moral deficiency, and although it is true that every virtuous society is necessarily a free society, not every free society is necessarily a virtuous society.
So, I support freedom for everyone because I know that freedom is the only way, and that society is based on cooperation between free people, and that if there is no freedom in a society, everything else is self-destruction. But I also recognize that the true battle is a moral battle, and that it is not simply freedom vs. oppression, but that it is also good against evil, for which we should not settle for simply being free, but we also need to strive to be good. In the end, it is as always, without virtue every society is destined for failure, and every man is destined for misery.
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