What exactly is Freedom?

I promise not to do this too often, but every once in a while I see another post, and have to "re post" it because I am so impressed with the logic and approach of the piece. Appeals to logic, and reason, seem to be in scarcity in this political environment. Sloppy definitions hurt all of us, and seemingly allow all sides to claim the mantle of our sacred cows. I thought this piece, from the "Voices of Reason" blog put out by the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights, was brilliant....

Freedom is not slavery
September 18, 2009 by Don Watkins
One of the great dangers today is that political concepts such as “freedom” and “liberty” have been virtually emptied of meaning, save for some positive emotional residue left over from this country’s founding. This allows them to be co-opted by those seeking to use their positive connotations to push an anti-freedom agenda.
Exhibit A: Thomas Frank, the Wall Street Journal opinion section’s token liberal, penned a column this week urging the left to reclaim the word “freedom” from the opponents of government intervention. This is no mere academic issue, Frank assures us: the unpopularity of Obama’s health care plan, he suggests, is at least partially the result of allowing critics to portray ObamaCare as an attack on freedom (which it is).
Curiously, in a column about the proper meaning of the word “freedom,” Frank never deigns to define it. Instead, he presents in pretty vague terms two different conceptions of “freedom.” One, which he attributes to the right, regards freedom as “the absence of the state.” The other, which he urges the left to trumpet, is hazily alluded to as follows:
That our ancestors could ever have understood freedom as something greater than the absence of the state would probably strike protesters as inconceivable. But they did. You can see it in that famous Norman Rockwell Thanksgiving painting from 1943: “Freedom from Want,” an illustration of one of Franklin Roosevelt’s “Four Freedoms.” Strange though it might sound, this is a form of freedom that pretty much requires government to get involved in the economy in order to “secure to every nation,” as Roosevelt put it, “a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants.” The idea is still enshrined today in the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
So that’s our choice, according to Frank: freedom means “anti-government,” or it means government “involvement” in the economy in the name of “freeing” us from want.
But while taking such great pains to invoke our ancestors’ understanding of freedom, Frank neglects to mention some earlier ancestors who had definite views on the meaning of freedom: the Founding Fathers.
“[A] wise and frugal government,” wrote Jefferson, is one which “shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government…”
Freedom, to the Founding Fathers, meant the ability of the individual to live his own life, to enjoy his own liberty, to acquire and use private property, to pursue his own happiness–without interference by others. It did not mean the absence of government, but a limited government whose sole purpose was to protect individual rights. (The absence of government, the Founders recognized, left man’s rights just as unguarded as under a tyranny.)
What Frank–like FDR before him–calls “freedom” is totally at odds with freedom as the Founders understood it. Freedom from “want” means that some men are to be forced to provide for the “wants” of others. The “freedom” to have health care without paying for it means that some people will be forced to pay for the health care needs of others.
The only thing that makes it possible to equate government intervention with “freedom” is widespread unclarity about what freedom actually is. But as the Founders understood, freedom does have a definite meaning. As Ayn Rand would later formulate it:
[W]hen I say “freedom,” I do not mean poetic sloppiness, such as “freedom from want” or “freedom from fear” or “freedom from the necessity of earning a living.” I mean “freedom from compulsion–freedom from rule by physical force.” Which means: political freedom.