In the future days which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms:...
-- President Franklin Roosevelt, Address to Congress, Jan. 6, 1941

In that speech FDR proposed that ".. .[to the] tyranny which the dictators seek to create with the crash of a bomb,... we [offer] the greater conception -- the moral order. ... Freedom means the supremacy of human rights everywhere" enumerating Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Worship, Freedom from Want, and Freedom from Fear as moral values to guide humanity threatened by the aggressions of Nazi Germany.

In contrast, before and after 9/11, President George W. Bush has focussed on a single overriding "freedom": economic freedom. The Fraser Institute offers this definition: "The key ingredients of economic freedom are personal choice, voluntary exchange, freedom to compete, and protection of the person and property".

Conspicuously lacking in these "freedoms" is any concept of the common good. These "economic freedoms" are all about individual rights to make decisions about health, education, faith, politics, friends, spouses, careers, and money. Exemplars of infringements on personal choice include warning labels on cigarettes or foods, Affirmative Action laws, and universal health care.

Personal choice is not parsed by Bush nor his supporters to include the freedom to choose abortion, marijuana, stem-cell research, or same-sex marriage. They consider poverty a failure of personal choice -- "choosing" to drop out of school or get pregnant, or "choosing" to go into debt. To them, religion is also a matter of personal choice -- but woe unto those who object to "under God" in the Pledge, or to posting the Ten Commandments in courthouses.

Freedom of voluntary exchange is essentially "Freedom from government-forced exchanges -- taxes, regulation, price controls, minimum-wage laws, tariffs, subsidies. It might reasonably be called "Freedom from Government" except that in the Bush ideology, government should have the power to regulate religious and sexual activities, manage public information, and oversee entertainment.

Under "economic freedom" the freedom to compete assumes that competitive markets and private ownership yield lower prices and better services to consumers. Oh? Are you better off now that suppliers of telephone, TV cable, natural gas, electricity and pharmaceuticals ‘compete’ for your business? Have competing private health care insurers saved you money? Will future generations be better off if we privatize schools, prisons, and water supplies?

Protecting person and property is about individual or corporate power to buy, sell and control and things they own -- land, natural resources, intellectual property. Under the Bush administration this is the "freedom" that most threatens the fundamental common good of our planet -- a healthy global environment free of weapons of mass destruction.

"A good society," FDR said in 1941, "is able to face schemes of world domination and foreign revolutions alike without fear," and he spelled out what he meant:

"The fourth is freedom from fear, which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor --anywhere in the world.

Today "economic freedom" is often conflated with "Freedom from Want", but they are not the same. Bush’s "economic freedom" puts profits for individuals and corporations ahead of the common good, and makes wealth the measure of all things. FDR was explicit that "Freedom from Want" meant "economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants."

Sixty-four years later, far from seeking to free humanity from fear and want, President Bush uses fear to promote his ideology of "economic freedom" and to justify his use of physical aggression in war. Bush and his henchmen have sown fear of Muslims, atheists, gays and liberals, and besieged us with reasons to fear government and acquiesce in dismantling democratically adopted policies and programs for the common good: environmental protections, Medicare and Social Security.

As I write, estimates of the dead in the Indian Ocean tsunamis have soared over 100,000, a tragedy on an unimaginable scale. Bush has reluctantly pledged $35 million in U.S. aid -- an amount that seems bitterly wrong when he spends about three times that amount every day to destroy the homes and livelihoods of Iraqis, to torture and kill those who resist or get in the way -- and to send Americans into harm’s way.

FDR had it right. Our most important moral values, our most precious freedoms are those that help us to "a healthy peacetime life" for all the inhabitants of the earth -- a world free of fear, want, and war.

Caroline Arnold (csarnold@neo.rr.com) served 12 years on the staff of Senator John Glenn and is now active in civic and environmental affairs in Kent, Ohio.

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