I didn’t want to make the title too long so I will define “most free” to be: most closely adhering the principle of “do whatever you want as long as you are not harming anyone “.
I am a aware that such high level principles are open to interpretation, so feel free to interpret it in a way that makes sense to you.
To me some consequences of this are
do whatever sex stuff you want with whichever consenting people you want to. Children are not old enough to consent.
put whatever substance you want into your body (alcohol, weed, cocaine, heroin). Suitable education on the consequences of any such substance should be available.
as an employer, you cannot base your hiring choices on what an individual does legally outside of work, because that is considered a harm to that individual.
I don’t know how to apply this principle to the situation of a mother choosing to have an abortion. I suppose you would have to decide when a foetus becomes an individual.
Etc
Note I am not advocating for anything here, although feel free to advocate for something if you wish. I am primarily interested in which society comes closest to this principle. But I am open to hearing opinions on the merits of such a guiding principle.
Based on how this country is presented in the US media, my guess would be New Zealand. I think the Scandinavian countries are up there at the top of the list as well. I wouldn’t count any of the countries that are “anything goes” due to being in a state of anarchy / civil war, because restrictions placed by formal governmental authority aren’t the only thing that limit freedom. The “rule of the warlord / mob” will likely place significant limits on freedom in such places.
What if what they’re doing outside of work harms the business? Say a neo-Nazi, who publicly advocates that Jews are greedy and evil, applies for a job at a car dealership (alternately, a car salesman is revealed publicly to be a neo-Nazi) – can the dealership boss refuse to hire or fire the neo-Nazi? If not, the car dealership may lose business, possibly even cease to be able to function.
ISTM that a business should have the right to fire/not hire someone who’s extracurricular activities will harm the business.
That’s where my freedom butts up against yours. Employers want to be free to hire who they want, based on anything they like. Landlords want to be free to rent to who they like…
Ultimately, employers, landlords, owners of restaurants, etc. are people who want freedom, too.
You have a valid point. As I was writing the op I realised there are a lot of grey areas. How do you think the principle of “do whatever you want as long as you are not hurting anyone “ should apply in these cases?
You can advocate for bigotry if you want, but someone can refuse to hire you for advocating bigotry if they think it will hurt their business. In other words, people, including business owners, are free to refuse to associate with Nazis if they want.
I’m not advocating for bigotry. I think it’s shitty to refuse to hire someone because of their race, etc. But being allowed to do so is a form of “personal freedom”, and the people who lobby for it are doing so because they “believe in freedom”. I think it’s important to recognize that personal freedom, like anything else, can be abused. And reasonable, decent people can believe that limits should be placed on it. In fact, i believe that limits should be placed on it, and when it comes right down to it, so does most everyone. What we argue about is which limits are good and which are bad.
That’s where we get into libertarianism. As I mentioned above, what the libertarians get wrong is that they focus only on restrictions imposed by the government, with a tendency to focus on larger (federal > state > local) governments. What they fail to realize (at least those that are true believers) is that restrictions on one’s freedom can come from many sources (like the above noted anti-Semitic car salesman refusing to sell to Jewish people), not just the duly elected government.
It’s a balancing game, but in general laws that prohibit bigotry and discrimination tend to create more freedom than they restrict.
ETA. Let’s take the example of the laws in Germany restricting Naziism. IMHO the overall effect is to create a greater amount of freedom for the population as a whole than if those laws weren’t in place.
Any society is a balance. The argument should be more than the extent of my freedom vs. the extent of your freedom. It should also be about the health of the society as a gestalt. Are there people starving and dying from lack of food in a society where the majority is overfed? Is ignorance growing? Are short-term gains pursued at the cost of long-term disaster? Is wealth valued over truth?
I’m not saying that these issues are more important than freedom. I’m saying that no society is going to stay very free for very long where the answers to the above questions is “yes.”
Based on my visit there in 2013, I do not think it would be New Zealand. I witnessed 2 events that do not happen in the US. The first was a mass compliance check near Auckland. A highway was blocked and every driver was checked for a valid license, registration and insurance. Along side the road I saw the police going through a number of cars also. There were signs to have your license, registration and insurance available. I pulled up and showed my state of Washington license and my rental car paperwork. The office glanced at them, said thank you and I was on my way.
The second was after leaving a the Trotting Cup race at Addington Park in Christchurch. Every car was stopped and every driver had to do a breathalyzer test. They even had mobile jail for anyone that failed the breath test. While waiting for my wife’s cousin to be tested, my wife said that this is unconstitutional. I had to remind her the US Constitution does not apply in New Zealand.
Nope, at least not on the point of granting the choice of substance abuse. NZ is the first country in the world to eradicate any tobacco consumption, though I don’t know their policies regarding any other drugs.
I would disagree on that: Scandinavian countries are very prescriptive regarding things that other countries regard as a private matter, like how much you can drink, disclosing your income and wealth on the tax office (it’s not a website, so that is OK) for all to see, taking child custody away from people, often single mothers or muslim foreigners, for petty motives (as I see it, they of course disagree). Social pressure in Scandinavian countries is very high in my experience. And their attitude towards cannabis and drugs in general is worse than paranoid.
I guess that in the end the “most free society” boils down to which rules you would follow more willingly, i.e., you have internalized. And it probably also plays a role whether you are in the top 1% or the bottom 1% of that society. There is a certain “freedom” that can be bought or at least rented in most societies.
That said, I believe that Germany and Spain are not that bad, all things considered. They are also the countries I happen to know best, there may be some bias in my perception.
If only Germany’s minister of health would have gone all the way in legalizing cannabis instead of demanding to be a member of a silly grower’s club. Just goes to show that everything German has to be organized in clubs.
I’ve been through such stops in the USA, more than once. As long as they’re stopping everybody, AIUI, it’s legal. What isn’t legal is selecting certain people to stop and not others.
At least once they were clearly not looking for valid paperwork, but for some particular person; they looked hard at everybody in the car, then passed most cars through. But it was the USA, and they were stopping everybody on the road.
– on about five minutes’ research: the purposes for which they’re stopping everybody may also be limited. However, the sobriety check you referenced is one of the legal purposes.
The Supreme Court has approved checkpoints in three types of situations:
permanent immigration-enforcement checkpoints near borders
temporary sobriety checkpoints aimed at removing impaired drivers from the road, and
temporary information-gathering checkpoints for police to obtain information about a completed crime.
This doesn’t go far enough. You should be free to put substances in your body if you want, but you should also be aware that this precludes any activity that could cause other people to come to harm; so no driving motor vehicles, no flying aircraft, no driving trains or bicycles - and there should be (and are) laws against such actions.
Is it desirable to separate political freedom from economic freedom? If you have the right to smoke dope but can’t afford to because your boss pays you poorly, how free are you? For that matter, if your boss can fire you at will–say, for smoking dope on your own time–how free are you? These are trivial examples, but they do suggest that limiting the discussion of freedom to the state and ignoring the economic may be a mistake.