You absolutely can have both, because the world does not boil down to simplistic either or choices. You can argue that freedom and security are oppostite poles of a sliding scale, and most people would agree with you. But nobody wants absolute freedom (anarchy and literal lawlessness) nor does anyone want absolute security. People want degrees of both.

It's a naieve mindset to think it's all or nothing.

> You absolutely can have both

It's a sliding scale between security and freedom. Every bit of security you want means giving up a corresponding freedom.

Also, most people do not include "freedom to harm others" when they're talking about freedom. I've never heard of anyone carrying a sign saying "FREEDOM" and meaning they want to be free to hurt others.

How am I less free because my country has free healthcare and decent unemployment benefits?

Neither of those is free. You still pay for it, plus you pay for the government's cost of administering it. You're worse off.

With "free" government health care, you're not only paying more for it, but you no longer get to choose what health care you get. You get what a government bureaucrat says you get.

Walter, it’s amazing how often I see you weigh in on economic and political issues on this forum when you have a poor grasp of even the basics. Claiming that privatised healthcare is somehow more efficient in spite of overwhelming real world evidence to the contrary, or that people are capable of meaningfully informed choices in picking a healthcare plan and somehow find it life-enhancing to have to do this, or ignoring the fact that funding it through taxation rather than insurance results in more universal and equitable access, and entirely glossing over adverse selection problems, is just amateur house stuff. You’d get laughed at in a high school classroom with this stuff but here you are trying to talk about it with authority.

Are you sure about your points?

I've never made the claim that privatized health care is more efficient. I have claimed that free market health care is more efficient. If you've got evidence that government health care is more efficient, let alone overwhelming evidence, I'd like to see it.

From what I've seen from high school economics, they can laugh at me all they want. But they don't know anything as they are taught by high school teachers who don't have any training in economics and have never held a private sector job or run a business.

Here's a reference for you with plenty of evidence that contradicts your claims. Read it and get back to me.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/09/how-ame...

BTW, you made one of my points for me. You just said that having the government force a plan on you is better than you picking your own plan. You gave up your freedom for security. Exactly what I was talking about.

Google "US health expenditure vs life expectancy" and "adverse selection in healthcare", read the top few links and get back to me.

You're making several basic mistakes thinking about freedom, because once again you're not even familiar with basic knowledge of the topic. In particular:

- Confusing the quality and quantity of choices. Free healthcare increases freedom because it increases overall quality of choices people can make - if you'd even encountered the concept of the capability approach to human welfare (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capability_approach) you wouldn't have made this basic mistake.

- You're conflating capitalism with freedom, when in fact capitalism is built on top of property law, a very anti-freedom system. Property is the biggest government program their is, and is enforced with violent anti-freedom, liberty-destroying government force.

In other words, you're so ideological you're not even wrong (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_even_wrong).

You didn't read the article I cited. Please return when you have.

BTW, the Soviet Union didn't allow people to own property, and had free healthcare. People were so free there they had to build a wall around it and shoot people who tried to escape. Ditto for every other communist country.

And where do those freedom-loving people want to go? The US. So many, in fact, that the US had to build a wall to keep them out.

What do all those people know that you missed?

People in Norway with high taxes, high state ownership of the economy, and a great welfare state seem to be happily staying in Norway rather than clamouring to move to the USA for the extra “freedom”, even in spite of the weather. What do all these people know that you missed?

No, I'm simply restating Maslov's hierarchy of needs. You cannot reach self-actualization without first covering basic needs. One of which is, ironically, called "safety". As in, perhaps, a safety net...

Or, in other words, to have the freedom to self-actualize, you must have security in your basic needs.