South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg, the young Democrat seeking the party’s 2020 nomination, has introduced a new freedom into the catalog of so-called freedoms used to justify the expansion of government: the freedom from cable companies.
Buttigieg, who has been a bit of a rising star among Democrats, has as part of his stump speech a riff about how conservatives have the wrong idea about freedom. He thought his comments were so insightful that his social media team clipped them and posted them to his Twitter account.
“We’ve allowed our conservative friends to get a monopoly on the idea of freedom,” Buttigieg said. “Now they care about freedom, but they care about a very specific kind of freedom: freedom from. Freedom from regulation, as though government were the only thing that could make us unfree. But that’s not true, is it? We know that your neighbor can make you unfree, your cable company can make you unfree. If they’re telling you who you ought to marry, your county clerk can make you unfree. You’re not free if you’re afraid to start a small business, because leaving your old job would mean losing your healthcare. You’re not free if there is a veil of mistrust between you as a person of color and the officers who are sworn to keep you safe. You’re not free if your reproductive choices are being dictated by male politicians in Washington.”
Don’t let anybody tell you that the other side is the side that’s got a handle on freedom. We are the party of freedom and we shouldn’t be afraid to go out there and say it. pic.twitter.com/2lTcEtoaah
— Pete Buttigieg (@PeteButtigieg) March 24, 2019
This carries on a long tradition in the Democratic Party of trying to distort the definition of freedom to justify a more expansive view of the government. Franklin D. Roosevelt did this in his famous 1941 “Four Freedoms” speech, in which he started off by naming freedom of speech and expression, freedom of worship, and then added the freedoms from “want” and “fear” everywhere in the world. The idea could be used to justify a massive government footprint that actually makes people significantly less free, and more dependent on the state. It is also a departure from the concept of freedom that would allow individuals to do as they wish, as long as their actions don’t actively interfere with somebody else’s ability to do the same.
What’s curious in Buttigieg’s rant is that the examples he gives intending to indict the free market for restricting freedom are examples of government policies or actions. Government regulations, for instance, helped entrench cable companies as large monopolies for decades, and local regulators are restricting broadband competition. The county clerk telling somebody who they can marry is a government official. The police are an organ of government. The reason why Americans’ healthcare is tied to their jobs is that the government distorted the tax code so that people could only get breaks for purchasing insurance through their employers rather than doing so on their own. Democratic proposals for expanding healthcare for everybody mean ending private insurance plans, including employer coverage, that people currently like and depend on and would require significant tax increases that limit how individuals can spend their own money.
On abortion, it’s a matter of a different perspective. To those of us who consider the unborn living beings (a group not limited to male politicians in Washington), we believe that they are entitled to the most basic protection — the right to life. Nobody is arguing that the government should not have a legitimate role in protecting people’s basic right to life from physical harm, we’re debating what we consider a life.
Buttigieg may be trying to put on a more friendly face than some of his rivals, but his vision for the role of government is still a dangerous one.
