Freedom Challenge - What is Freedom?

Freedom is based upon the premise that each person is autonomous and unique. In it's simplest form, I think it can be reduced to the idea that:

I am the only person in the world who will live my life. That means that I am the only person who should make decisions regarding it.

Humans are conscious, sentient beings and we are all so different. My hopes and fears and opinions are as different from yours as are our talents and our flaws. It is impossible to create uniformity of either thought or action. When governments try to do so, they fail. But that failure has many consequences, almost all of which are bad. An attempt to remove or restrict freedom removes everything that makes human beings special and life worth living.

All that said, liberty does not mean a license to do whatever a person wants without consequences. Freedom gives me the right to make choices for my life, as it does you for yours. Anyone who demands the right to make decisions while avoiding their ramifications does not want freedom; they crave control.

"Of Liberty then I would say that, in the whole plenitude of it’s extent, it is unobstructed action according to our will: but rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will, within the limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add ‘within the limits of the law’; because law is often but the tyrant’s will, and always so when it violates the right of an individual." - Thomas Jefferson, April 4, 1819.

"Liberty, according to my Metaphysicks, is an intellectual Quality. An attribute, that belongs not to Fate nor Chance. Neither possesses it, Neither is capable of it. There is nothing moral or immoral in the Idea of it. The definition of it, is a Self Determining Power, in an intellectual Agent. It implies, Thought, and Choice, and Power. It can elect between Objects, indifferent in point of Morality; neither morally good nor morally evil. If, the Substance in which, this quality, Attribute, Adjective, call it which you will, exists, has a moral Sense, a Conscience, a moral Faculty; if it can distinguish between moral good and moral Evil, and has power to choose the former, and refuse the latter: it can, if it will, choose the Evil, and reject the Good, as We See, in experience it, very often does." - John Adams, April 15, 1814.