English speakers are confused about the idea of “liberty.” I hope you in Brazil are not.
It comes from the Normal Conquest of 1066. French speakers became the masters. English therefore often has two words for the same thing, one Germanic, here “freedom,” and another Latinate, here “liberty.” English has hundreds of such pairs.
The two words once meant the same thing, namely, “not being a slave.” Then about a century and a half ago the Germanic word got out of its cage and started wandering around. The Latinate word on English tongues still connotes not having a coercive master. But from the 1880s the Germanic word started to mean also “having the income to do things.” You can see that the two meanings differ. One is a word of status. A liberated woman is one who is not coerced by her husband. The other is a word for income. But we already have a word for income. Income.
President Abraham Lincoln in 1863 spoke of “a new birth of liberty, “using the Latinate word to mean the first triumph of liberalism, the abolition of slavery. But he used the Germanic word in the speech to mean exactly the same thing: no slavery.
But when President Roosevelt in 1941 spoke of “four freedoms” he mixed the two meanings. Number One was “freedom of speech,” portrayed in a famous painting by the popular artist Norman Rockwell showing a man speaking out at a public meeting. A slave is not permitted to speak his mind. But Number Three was the other meaning, “freedom from want,” “want” being a somewhat unusual word meaning “lack of income, poverty.” Rockwell portrayed Number Three as a family gathered around a Christmas feast. Not having a coercive master is not the same thing as having a meal.
I just reviewed a book by the Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz. You might think, as Joe puts it, that “a person facing extremes of want is not free [to buy food, say].” But if we don’t keep the two meanings separate, we think that state coercion to give people food is the same as not being a slave.
We answer the question whether political liberty or state coercion leads to riches just by definition. Coercion wins.
Weekly column in Folha de São Paulo, Brazil
Translated into Portuguese for the newspaper.