Four Freedoms

In the year 1941 the president Franklin Delano Roosevelt delivered a speech before congress in which he mentioned four freedoms that all humanity is worthy to have: Freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. President Roosevelt used the speech to convince the nation to abandon their isolationist position taken after WWI. Eleven months after the speech was given, the United States of America declared war on Japan.

Each freedom has a more profound description. The freedom of speech means you can express yourself with the words you use. Freedom of worship means you can adore God in your own way. Freedom from fear means to reduce the armaments and violence around the world that people may live peacefully. Freedom from want means to have economic agreements that ensure the world a better way of life to every citizen that inhabits it.

Before entering World War II the United States of America had just gone through the depression and  needed a boost in the economy, so I will say no more but leave it to the economist, Paul Krugman, “…and it took an enormous public works program known as world war II to bring the economy out of the depression.”

Allow me to be a bit clearer with my words. Those freedoms were not meant to be exercised. They were just an excuse to enter the war and increase the United States economy. After the speech was given, the armament production increased substantially in the United States and African Americans were still treated with fewer rights. In some schools today you cannot talk about religion without taking the risk of getting suspended or in the worst case scenario, expelled. In other words, the freedom of expression is being thwarted. We live in a world full of fear that fills the news with tragedies. People are afraid of war, sickness, terrorism, and what not.

The people must decide to fight for the enforcement these freedoms. If the government will not give them to you, you must excercise them yourself. Freedoms have boundaries or else they might be at risk of turning into immoralities. If we say, we can worship however we want, because we have the freedom to do so, the limits of that right need to be revised.

The respect and implementation of private property rights is the boundary of freedoms. If a person is a Catholic in his property and does not allow any other form of worship in his property, people must respect that limit and not do as they wish in his or her property. When you go back to your property you can keep worshiping in whatever way you want. Aslo, you will not scream in a theater because the owner of such theater has said you cannot be noisy or you will be banned of being in the theater. In the same way, you have to respect the property of your fellow neighbors and citizens or be counted as a violator of humans’ natural rights. We own our body, if someone violates our being in any way, we have the right to defend ourselves against them and the law will support us, the same is or has to be true with every property that exists.

You cannot go around every restaurant half-naked just because you live in a free country and you can do as you wish. You cannot point a gun at someone and steal from them. You cannot enter a private property and start living in it, take what you can find, and leave. Every property has a form of government that establishes limits and gives sanctions it can establish on you if you do not respect those boundaries. It is better to respect the property of someone else, because this will automatically protect the liberty and the life of people. Nevertheless, as we have seen, the central government tries hard to penetrate our rights and find a way around the defenses founded to protect us from such invasions to accopmlish its own ends.

Here is a link if you want to know more about the Four Freedoms.