Why is this framed as opposing ideas?
To be clear the question was framed as "Which is more important: Freedom to pursue life's goals without state interference or State guarantees nobody is in need."
Life's goals are ill defined, freedom from need is also a life goal.
This is fucking nonsense
I'm American, and I concur that Freedom is the most important value for a society to uphold.
Thank you for your input, that just confirms what the studies showed. Freedom has many faces, not being left on the roadside because you can't outcompete in the gig-economy is also a form of freedom.
There's an excellent video on the youtube channel Second Thought that goes through a list of freedoms, I encourage you to watch it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4xqouhMCJBI
They expose the positive freedoms ("freedom to...") and negative freedoms ("freedom from...") – and also show how capitalism opposes all those freedoms, because they're based.
Examples :
- Positive Freedom: having the capacity to act according to one's free will
- Negative Freedom: the freedom from coercion by others
These values have a pretty large overlap. I suspect the real difference is in the US belief in personal destiny, in other words that people not only can can be self-sufficient, but would be if external interference were removed. They don't see it as the universe itself being difficult and humanity collectively creating a solution. They know the game is rigged to keep them poor, property-less, and dependent, but they see social programs and corporate/wealth interests as about equally responsible for that (as in fact they are often well aligned in practice, since in practice the wealthy get what they want no matter what they call it), as opposed to the magic of personal willpower. So the slogan "no one in need" doesn't sound benign at all, and "freedom" sounds like the path to fulfillment.
Either way, in the US, the reason to remove need would be to have more freedom, and the result of freedom is the elimination of need.
