Oysters or Eagles? E. W. Sollitt

The road to freedom in America must begin with the decision as to what kind of freedom we want. Is it free dom from something, or freedom for something? To our forefathers, freedom meant the right to risk capital in the hope of a return on their investments; the right of unlimited expansion of their businesses; the [298 ] right to let the people, in true democratic fashion, cast their ballots in the cash registers of the nation. for the businesses which served them best. Freedom to them was a positive thing, and they wisely chose the eagle as their national emblem. More recently we have been indoctrinated with the negative idea that by "freedom" we mean freedom from taking risks and making our own choices and decisions. This negative attitude toward freedom exhibits itseH in the very expressions we use. Instead of freedom for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, we speak of free..

dom from want, worry, and war (and work too, if possible). And we have been so busy fleeing from, these specters that we have turned a comer and run right into their arms. We have sought freedom from fear so avidly that all it has gotten us is a fear of freedom. We are fast becom.. ing a nation of oysters. Instead of following the time.. honored custom of honest men and enjoying the freedom to work for, save for, and buy the things we want, we have thought that it would be easier to elect men to Congress who would give us what we want at the ex pense of others. We Must Choose And so our new immoral freedom to take by law that which belongs to another has destroyed the old freedom to enjoy unmolested the fruits of our ingenuity and toil. First, we must decide which kind of freedom we want [299 ] in the years ahead, the freedom of oysters or the freedom of eagles, the freedom of parasites or the freedom of noble men, the freedom of pirates or the freedom of honest persons.

Second, if it is the freedom of honest persons that we hope to enjoy, we must resist all tendencies toward further socialization, for socialism is piracy. Socialism is robbing the man who earns for the benefit of the one who doesn't. It is in every sense a system of "the survival of the sickest=" because it robs the ambitious of their initiative and keeps the people who never had any initiative from developing any. Socialism has demonstrated four facts over and over again: 1. You can't multiply wealth by dividing it. 2. It does no good to get rid of a few little monopolies by creating a big one called ':':govemment." 3. The government cant give what it does not first take away. 4. It can never take away enough to supply the ever increasing demands of those who are led to believe they are getting something for nothing when they get it from Uncle Sam. If we want to be a free people, we must begin to do what we ought to do because we ought to do it and not just when we are forced to it. This demanding that we be forced to be good before being willing to behave, is the root of much of our trouble. Burton Parks in Better Homes and Gardens put it this way: ':':We'llnever reach [300 ] maturity in America until we get over the idea that whatever is legal is also moral."

No people can long maintain their freedom unless they are morally worthy of it. The only alternative to the imposition of controls from without is the exercise of controls from within. The only alternative to being forced to do what we ought, which is a form of slavery, is to do what we ought because we want to-and this is the only basis on which freedom can be built. Let us here dedicate ourselves to showing that covet ousness doesn't pay, that liberty is never license to do as we please but only freedom to do as we ought, and that freedom is only for those who will accept the respon sibilities that go along with it. [301 ] TWO WAYS TO SLAVERY IN THE Old Testament there are two thought-provoking stories of how a people brought about their own en slavement. While both examples show that slavery is a moral issue, for the most part the stories use economic and political events and decisions to record the degree of bondage and how it came about. The real lesson lies in the fact that these people became slaves through a sequence of events which, at the time, seemed to be a good course for them to follow. Since we're making these same mistakes in America today to an alarming degree, these two stories hold for us a significant lesson.