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Comment by dfilppi | Hacker News Reader

Interesting that liberty is irrelevant. It's only shopping whatever system produces the most prosperity for certain voting blocks. Just the framing of the discussion signals dark times ahead.

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I'm not sure it's possible to have liberty without prosperity. If the only way someone can provide for their needs is to conform then they don't have liberty. This is probably even more the case as it becomes less and less realistic for people to go off and provide for themselves (e.g. by homesteading).

How do you define liberty? there seem to be a lot of competing definitions of liberty.

The adjective liber in Latin is what the slaves are not, that is, "unrestricted [people]". The root 'lewdh-, from which it comes, is also in Leute and ljudi (people). Liberty today seems to be often used to mean unrestrictedness of capital/property/contracts, so the connection I see with its semantic history is the idea that some people can be more people than others, and that the government should be strong enough to deter anyone from threatening this state of liberty (e.g. back then by fleeing from slavery, now by ... well the list is too long). Remember the words of Laozi, long and short give rise to each other.

What liberty is there to be found in the hierarchical private firm?

I'm certainly not at liberty to do aught but what my manager commands, nor he but what his commands, and so on.

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