Is “Freedom” What We Are Fighting For? If So, What Price “Freedom”?

by Sandy Cook, Staff Writer

Every period, every cause, every war, every political campaign, even every commercial product pitch comes up with a catch-phrase that quickly becomes a cliché. The phrase is repeated and repeated until it loses its meaning, if it ever had one, and goes right on being repeated by those who will never understand what it was supposed to mean originally.

One of the most enduring of these clichés is “Freedom Isn’t Free”. Well, I have to believe that statement to be true as a matter of practical and critical analysis, but does it mean the same thing to me as it does to the people who are spouting it endlessly on the internet, on the talk shows, and in the press? I am not sure, but I have my suspicions.

And if freedom isn’t free, then who pays? By that, of course, I mean who really pays? How much? In what currency?

All wars are not fought for freedom, no matter what the supporters say. To fight for freedom means that you have to be committed to fighting for some definable group of people who are either not free, or who are in danger of losing whatever freedom they may have. It can be your own people, or it can be others, but it has to be people – not land, not treasure, not power, certainly not jingoism – people.

     People have to be the decisive and profoundly important objective of a fight for freedom. Otherwise, you obviously are fighting for something else, whatever it may be, but it is not “freedom”.

And when you spout the cliché, you have to be prepared to follow up with the words “… and I am prepared to pay.” If you can’t do that, then don’t even talk about it, because talking isn’t doing it, is it?

Regardless, if we fight we should be fighting for a cause. Not one person’s cause, or one small group’s cause – our cause, the people’s cause, the nation’s cause. If it isn’t “freedom”, then it must be some other cause that we can all get behind.

If freedom or something else is our cause in a particular war, what does it mean that “our cause isn’t free”?

From the point of view of most Americans it is pretty much free. Oh yes, they will suffer a bit from a slight lack of services because the of the cost of the war, and the cost of servicing the debt of the war, but they won’t really see that, will they? For those who believe that government has no place in our lives on any level, the result of reduced services should be a gain, at least by their definition.

If “war is not free”, then it has to have a describable cost, doesn’t it? The true cost of war isn’t just the armaments, the operating costs, and the salaries of serving soldiers, it is the complete cost including the cost of compensating those who are truly paying a price – the serving military and their families – and compensating them in full.

We only compensate them in full if we take into account the full effect of their service on their lives and the lives of their families. You can repair cars for three years and then go on to something else and there is no lasting negative effect. You can get a job painting houses or building them for three years, and unless you are injured on the job, when the job is over you are pretty much the same person you were when you started.

Soldiers aren’t.

We know full well that almost without exception the effect of military service, even including the service of those who do not see war, has a lasting change on the individual soldier. Training to kill starts it, and then the stress and trauma of war, should they go, solidifies it and intensifies it to a point where many need lifetime support. It is simpler to define the support needed by those who have suffered physical trauma, but there are also 300,000 out there from the current wars who are suffering from psychological trauma, and that is only a portion of the millions suffering from previous wars.

Those who have paid the price – physical or mental – know that it isn’t free – they have paid a terrible price. What about the rest?

What if wars had to be currently funded, and funded to the full extent of their long-term costs? What if we truly had to have a balanced defense budget but could not cut back on expenses? Then for 2010, based on current rates, individual income taxes would have to increase by $100B and corporate taxes by $26B. That means an increase in income taxes of $335 per person or $1,340 for a family of four. Of course prices in local stores would nearly double since the tax on corporations would be added to the price of goods, but then we all would really know that “war isn’t free”.

This tax surcharge would have to be collected long after the war was over – so long as there is a soldier alive who needs help, although, if we were clever enough to stay out of wars of choice we might be able to reduce that surcharge after twenty years or so, but it would go on until the last veteran died or no longer needed care.

There are a few ways to recoup some bucks.
 
It costs $2B a year to run the House and Senate, and they only are doing about 20% of the job called for in Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution. We ought to be able to collect about $1.6B back from them, thereby reducing the individual debt by a little over $5. Congress would then know that “war isn’t free”. Congress could still meet, but they would have to let their staffs go; since they all do so little real work for the American people we citizens shouldn’t notice any real difference. They cannot come to grips with the real needs of the country, and they certainly cannot act to solve the problems that veterans face.

Of course they can pass bills like the Patriot Act without even reading it, and do it in two days, giving away our true freedoms out of quaking and quivering fear, but they have been jawboning full compensation for veterans practically since the Revolutionary War, addressing it only piecemeal, and never quite coming to grips with it. They can shovel money out the door to failed banks and businesses without a moment’s hesitation, but must always go back to their committees and pick the nits when it comes to veterans benefits until the issue dies or time runs out. If we cut them back to themselves and a secretary, all on reduced salary, they would then be free to concentrate on their real job which is reelection.

We could also line up behind our founding fathers and their fear of the power of inherited wealth, and reinstate truly progressive taxation and reestablish solid estate taxes. We’d reduce the war tax surcharge by $3 for every billion collected.  The wealthy who generally do not send their sons and daughters to fight would begin to understand that “war isn’t free”.

Since American CEOs are making 363 times the average worker’s salary, we could let them continue to get paid at that level, but tax away everything over $1M. They would get to keep score based on their pretax salary and brag and gripe about their “true earnings”, and we could get one heck of a windfall. That would lower our individual surcharge to pay for the war by at least $25/person, and probably more.

We could reduce expenditure, and lower the war surcharge accordingly, by having open competition on all government contracts, and award only fixed fee contracts. Defense contractors would begin to understand that “war isn’t free”, and it certainly shouldn’t be free to freebooters and war profiteers.

Billions could be saved by stopping the subsidies to mega-agriculture, and other businesses perfectly capable of standing on their own in their much-beloved free market. That’s $30 or so off the war tax surcharge.

Families who refuse to send their sons and daughters to fight should be required to pay the taxes of the families who do, thus no one would have to pay more than once. It wouldn’t be too much of an additional burden since only one half of one percent of all families are sending their kids to fight our wars.

This is all fanciful, of course, but the core message is that before you say “freedom isn’t free”, when what you really mean is “war isn’t free”, then you had better be prepared to pay your share of the price.

Otherwise, kindly shut up!

“War is sweet to those who have not tried it. The experienced man is frightened at the heart to see it advancing.”