In the West,personal freedom is being sacrificed at the altar of security
On freedom and equality,two of three rallying cries of the revolution of 1789,the French and Anglo-Saxon worlds have differed. Each finds both important,at least if equality is defined as equality of opportunity,but disagrees on how they should be balanced.
Liberty unchecked by solidarity does not make a French heart beat faster the way freedom untrammelled lifts the American spirit. Here the state is cherished as protector rather than reviled as predator. It is seen as the balancer of economic opportunity,not the brake on it.
History and geography explain these differences: French borders have not changed much for centuries while an Americans imagination always stands at some new frontier. The Gallic cake,of static size,needs fraternal division,while the US cake demands eternal expansion.
So President François Hollandes proposal for a 75 per cent marginal tax rate on annual incomes over one million euro is really no surprise. It is just the latest example of the recurrent Gallic itch to deliver equality by decree and somehow divide the cake in a way that makes the world more just. Like any fiscal measure that offends common sense,it wont work. But on the larger question of freedom,and who has more of it,the time has come for the Anglo-Saxon world (as the French insist on calling it) to shake off the smug assumption comforted by Hollandes confiscatory idea that it enjoys a clear advantage.
Conventional measures of freedom have become inadequate. By those measures the world has been growing freer. Freedom House,the Washington-based human-rights organisation,reckons 60 per cent of the worlds nations are free,compared with 41 per cent in 1989. The victories over repressive societies captured by these statistics are important. So why do we often feel less free more crimped,more watched,more cautious,more fearful,more corralled?
The answer is that the balance between personal freedom and government oversight has gotten seriously skewed throughout the West,and especially the Anglo-Saxon West,over the past decade. Post-9/11 security is invoked,sometimes health,always safety. The temptation to monitor peoples lives often proves irresistible because the technology now exists to do so. Fear is cultivated to justify technological intrusion and ubiquitous cameras.
But safety should not be paramount; it is not a supreme value; it should not be the altar at which freedom is sacrificed. This is not the spirit that took Anglo-Saxon forces into a hail of fire and onto the Normandy beaches to free the French,it will be recalled.
France is now freer in one important regard than its Anglo-Saxon cousins. A deep Gallic suspicion of technology and anonymous efficiency allied to a deep respect for community has curtailed the imprisonment of modernity. This is an incarceration that fences the soul more than any confiscatory tax rate.
