CONFUSION OF TERMS:

This police state hysteria: Fanciful libertarians are promoting an idea of freedom that is really the right to do as one pleases (David Selbourne, 4/08/08, The Guardian)

In the current debate about the need for a bill of rights in Britain, it is overlooked that no civil society can rest upon the possession of rights alone. And in the hysteria over the supposed need to protect our freedoms from "attack" it is now even stated that Britain is proceeding towards the condition of a "police state".

Some familiarity with real recent police states - East Germany or Romania - would teach those who bemoan the "rolling back of individual liberty" to temper their paranoid arguments.

Instead, modern free societies, the freest history has known, are gradually disintegrating from abuse of their freedoms. The harms being done to them by exploitation of their liberties are real; the harms being caused to them by the erosion of those liberties are largely imaginary.

It is here too that most of the left, whose socialist ideals have largely been displaced by an open-ended libertarianism, should take care. For the vacuous notion of liberty they now espouse is really a claim to the right to do as one pleases.

A decent democratic society must have liberty, but must abhor freedom.

Posted by Orrin Judd at April 7, 2008 7:18 PM