Uhuru-- And The Heritage Foundation

Every year, the corporately-funded far right-wing Heritage Foundation releases, in conjunction with the reactionary Wall Street Journal, a ranking of nations to promote conservative visions of what "freedom" is. They claim the methodology for their index is based on the concepts in Adam Smith's 1776 book, The Wealth of Nations. The concept of "freedom" has changed a great deal from the time when it included government protecting the rights of ordinary people from more powerful predators.

Let's turn to Thom Hartmann's new book, Treshold to see how the meaning of freedom has changed since the time when England's nobles forced King John to sign the Magna Carta granting them-- the great nobles, but not the lesser nobles, let alone the common people-- the right to habeas corpus, something that conservatives have been still working on weakening.

[T]he definition of "freedom" evolved somewhat between the thirteenth and twentieth centuries, but was always largely grounded in the notion that much of freedom had to do with individual's being free from harassment or imprisonment by government, or by exploitation by other, more powerful individuals (or groups of individuals).

As America and much of the modern world industrialized in the late nineteenth century, though, a new definition of "freedom" began to take hold. Historically, wealth was held by a small number of people, and one of the dimensions of "freedom" was the protection, or at least the ideal of protection, of the average person from exploitation by those of great wealth (read Dickens for examples).

Hartmann then explains how sociopaths, from Lenin and Stalin on the left to Mussolini, John Nash and Ayn Rand on the right, started redefining freedom "as the individual's ability and right to totally selfish self-fulfillment, regardless of the consequences to others (within certain limitations) or the individual's failure to participate in and uplift society as a whole."

Freedom was a negative force in this new world view of von Hayek, his student Milton Friedman (father of the "Chicago School" philosophy of libertarian economics), and Ayn Rand's objectivism. It was as much the freedom "from" as it was the freedom "to": freedom from social obligation; freedom from taxation; freedom from government assistance or protection ("interference"); freedom to purely consider one's own wants and desires, because if every individual followed only his own selfish desires, the mass of individuals doing so in a "free market" would create a utopia.

This was a radical departure from eight centuries of the conceptualization of freedom. Instead of providing the soil in which freedom would grow, these new visionaries (some would say reactionaries, some revolutionaries) saw government as the primary force that stopped freedom.

They claimed that there vision of a truly free world, where government constrained virtually nothing except physical violence and all markets were "free"-- markets being the behavior of individuals or collectives of individuals (corporations)-- had never been tried before on the planet. Their opponents, the classical liberals, said that indeed their system had been tried, over and over again throughout history and in fact was itself was the history of every civilization in the world during its most chaotic and feudal time. Lacking social contracts and interdependence, "Wild West" societies were characterized by both physical and economic violence, with those who were most willing to exploit and plunder rising to the economic (and, eventually, political) top. They were called robber barons.

Today's Heritage Foundation release flows right out of this vision of right-wing, Randian dystopia, currently the second most important value-- after racism-- in the teabagger (or Know Nothing) movement. And, needless to say, with the end of Bush's residency in the White House, the U.S. has fallen out of the ranks of the "free" countries (and Canada, with it's progressive healthcare system, is a hair's breath from following). Two fascist dictatorships, Hong Kong, which is 100% ruled by Communist China, and Singapore, are the #1 and #2 free-est countries in the 1984 Ministry of Truth world that is the Heritage Foundation.