Cologne 21-Oct-2004

Liberal thinkers are right to point out the inescapable trade-off
between individual freedom and the security offered by a social welfare
state invested with the power to posit limits to individual freedom, not
only to prevent or correct a collision of individual interests, but also
and increasingly, to impose a conception of social justice that
overrides individual freedoms. In the name of social security and social
justice, free interchange among individuals is transformed into
subjection to state power and the state’s will. The liberal casting of
human freedom is antithetical to a socialist or social-democratic
casting of human being as socially secure -- literally 'without care',
'care-free' -- in which each member of society, in the name of social
justice, has a right to certain material benefits, to secure employment
and to being cared for by a subject superior to civil society. The state
thereby becomes the guarantor not of individual freedom but of material
benefits through which the individual’s dependence on the state grows
and consolidates to become a fixed habit of living.

Individual freedom is essentially bound to caring for one’s own
existence, leading one’s own life, and to not having one’s cares removed
by social security. The very benefits provided by the state -- and not
just state-imposed restrictions and denials of individual freedom --
must therefore be regarded as dangerous for individual freedom and
self-responsibility. Such benefits must always be well considered, not
as a citizen’s 'inalienable right', but, as far as possible, as
transitional aid. The call for social justice must be seen in its
intimate connection with a tendency of human being to flee the
responsibility and uncertainty of having to care for its own existence
through the exercise of individual freedom in favour of being cared for.
Social justice is the up-dated, secularized concept of being provided
for by providence. Divine dispensation becomes the destiny of being
dispensed material benefits by the supreme social power, instead of
being recognized as the luck dealt out by exposure to the constantly
shifting, fathomless interplay of economic interchanges on the markets.

Mind your mind./Begeistere deinen Geist.
Cheers/Gruesse,
Michael
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_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_ Dr Michael Eldred -_-_-
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