John Wendell Ames
Liberty to the Rescue shows how recommitment to the principles of liberty can arrest and cure the extreme polarization, despair, and incivility poisoning our republic. While Americans have been fortunate to enjoy more liberty than most of the world, we rarely appreciate what we have, and so risk losing that and more if we don’t practice and defend it.Liberty is introduced as simple restraints we apply to ourselves as we deal with our fellow citizens. The classical definitions of liberty such as freedom of speech, religion, and private property follow when these restraints also apply to government. Living in an environment of liberty is seen as valuable from personal, cultural, spiritual, and even cosmic perspectives. A dozen principles common in American politics, but to some degree contrary to liberty, are visited to understand their appeal and their risks.Government policies are observed through the lens of liberty to judge their suitability for a free people. We learn that a strong government is needed to preserve liberty, but that same government has the potential to destroy it. Our task is learning how to control this beast.This is neither a partisan polemic nor an academic treatise, but an informal though detailed discussion of liberty and how it can guide policy. The origins of liberty and government are reviewed only in enough detail to set the stage, where we see that liberty is a fairly recent development in human history, and is still being developed. The focus is primarily on how liberty can work in the here and now with real people facing real life.The author applies skills learned as a Ph.D. engineer analyzing complex systems, and experience gained as a volunteer municipal planning commissioner, to untangle some of the vexing problems of current issues to discover improved policies.
