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Comment by xbryanx | Hacker News Reader

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

I used to use this quote all the time too...until I realized it originally meant something entirely different.

http://techcrunch.com/2014/02/14/how-the-world-butchered-ben...

I don't see how it means something entirely different. At most, Franklin and the other founding fathers had a more expansive notion of liberty than is now common. Both the sanctity of private property and the right to privacy are aspects of that sort of liberty.

I think the point is that the context is fundamentally different:

"In short, Franklin was not describing some tension between government power and individual liberty. He was describing, rather, effective self-government in the service of security as the very liberty it would be contemptible to trade. Notwithstanding the way the quotation has come down to us, Franklin saw the liberty and security interests of Pennsylvanians as aligned."

http://www.lawfareblog.com/2011/07/what-ben-franklin-really-...

This is a vastly better article, and actually makes a reasonable case. Thanks.

Still, I don't think it's fair to say the context is "fundamentally different". In Franklin's situation, the trade-off was to give up a degree of the colony's self-governance (with power taken by the unelected governor) in order to get safety from the war being fought on their frontier. Yes, in his case it wasn't so much personal (individual) liberty as it was the notion of colonial self-governance. But I don't think it's so vastly different as to say the quote's original meaning has been greatly distorted.

Here's the original letter:

http://franklinpapers.org/franklin/framedVolumes.jsp?vol=6&p...

Is private property really still sanctified when so much of our wealth has come from robbery, slavery, and rents extracted under intimidation?

How do you propose we clean the slate?

I don't think we can clean it. Any redistributive attempt to do so would involve coercive force. It sucks, but it means that for most societies, talking about property as sacred is ultimately a fantasy.

OK, we might just be talking about different senses of "sacredness". I'm certainly not talking about, say, a glowing aura surrounding a piece of property that dims when the property is every taken illegally. I just mean that taking someones stuff is a very bad thing to do, to be compared with (depending on the severity) physically assaulting them.

Is private property really still sanctified when so much of our wealth has come from robbery, slavery, and rents extracted under intimidation?

Strong property rights are very useful to a healthy economy, but sanctified?

Depends on how fundamentalist libertarian you are. Private property is the heart of libertarianism. Theft, trespassing - almost all laws that govern do so to protect private property which comes in many forms - including, but not limited to - your body, your person, your family, your house, your possessions.

The standard reply here is that none of those bad foundations is a good justification for someone else (e.g. your neighbor, your homeowner's association, or the state government) to take your stuff, unless they can actually show that whose stuff it ought to be.

If I could hypothetically follow the "chain of legitimacy" for, say, your car all the way back to the original exertion of labor on natural resources...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_theory_of_property

...I'd likely find some sort of illegal activity at some point. But this doesn't mean I can take your car by force and give it charity.

The biggest problem is the quote is now used to set up a false dichotomy between safety and liberty when it was originally more about balancing short and long term priorities. Franklin was simply making a quip about the legislature considering the deal from the Penn family. He meant something along the lines of "people who give up their rights to self governance for temporary safety don't deserve either to govern themselves or be protected" He was basically responding to the potential deal with "do you think we are stupid cowards?" or a slightly more eloquent version of "do you think I was born yesterday?"

I still don't see the problem. It is a well known argument that liberties are tend to ratchet down (never up), so that any time you give up your liberties for some new threat (say, terrorism) you are making a short-term/long-term trade off.

The biggest difference was just the Franklin was talking about self-governance rather than individual civil liberties, both these are obviously closely connected. I think your version ("people who give up their rights to self governance for temporary safety don't deserve either to govern themselves or be protected") is very compatible with the sense in which this quote is used by modern civil liberties proponents.

I think the idea that civil liberties always ratchet down is very debatable if not flat out wrong. The only people who were guaranteed civil liberties when Franklin said that quote were wealthy, white, heterosexual, protestant men. We have certainly improved things since then.

I am also not ready to categorize terrorism as a sort term issue. I don't foresee anyway the War On Terror ever really ends without us simply abandoning it. In my mind the modern argument should be more about the effectiveness of abridging civil liberties than about the temporary nature of the threat (which was one of the central points of Franklin's quote).

Yes, obviously when we founded a new country through a violent revolution grounded ideologically in civic freedoms, those freedoms increased. The racheting effect is only argued to occur within a given government, i.e., between revolutions or other massive shocks.

I agree that some nuances having to do with time frames were lost when this was converted to a slogan; I think we just disagree on whether this is critical. You're right that the War on Terror never ends, but that supports my point: the actual threat of terror is small and transitory, but the machinery created to fight it (including the curtailment of freedoms) persists indefinitely.

It never ceases to amaze me how much the mythology surrounding the Founding Fathers really boils down to taxation.

Because all they knew of taxation was theft of the poor to line the pockets of the rich with no true benefit coming from taxes paid (other than avoiding prison).

Sound familiar?

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