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About two years ago, my wife decided that she wanted to start a new business, designing and arranging flowers for large events.
This morning, at 4 am, she went to the Los Angeles flower market, where people from dozens of countries, many not speaking any english, offered to sell her flowers. If she thought the price was fair, she bought them. If not, she walked past. No one intervened.
All day, she's been using her skills to place the flowers she bought in arrangments so that the final product is worth more than the raw materials. She will sell that arrangment to a mexican-american family that is celebrating their daughter's quinceniera. No one will intervene.
Later tonight, we'll use that money to take a friend out to dinner. He's leaving the country for 7 months to go play drums in Japan. No one knocked on the door to ask him why he was leaving, and no one will try to shoot him in the back at the border. He will live by the consequences of his decision, and when he is done, will come home. No one will intervene.
What is freedom? We make choices about how to use our time and skills to make ourselves useful to society, and we live by the consequences of those decisions. By and large, no one intervenes. We make choices about how to engage in moral behavior, and except where those moral decisions intefere with the rights of others, we live by the consequences of those decisions. By and large, with a few notable exceptions (prostitutions and drug use, maybe?), no one intervenes.
-sm
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