It's time to finally read that Goldman Sachs article that appeared in Rolling Stone Magazine and is responsible for a lot of why you've been hearing about Goldman Sachs. While Matt Taibbi is a sensationalist writer, he landed one bombshell line that galvanized me against all that right-wing nonsense talk about freedom this, freedom that:

And this is why, even with the Blue Dog Democrats whose votes against universal healthcare have been bought, I still distrust the right-wing party more. They're always trying to sell this faux populist freedom, which is way more about giving their buddies freedom to Oil, freedom to pollute, freedom to hack the financial markets, etc.

I'm against all concentrations of power that don't ultimately serve the most good for the most people. I realize that free markets are efficient precisely because of greed. And that's great when we all benefit from low prices at Wal-Mart. But when that greed goes haywire, which is much more often than we like to admit, then we have to ask ourselves, what is the freedom that we're granting these corporations buying us?

So much of the sale of freedom by the Right is meant to keep us from organizing together into a common interest. "Here, you little guys stay free, and we'll bind ourselves together to plunder you." That's what I really parse when I hear John Boehner and Rush Limbaugh expound on the great graces of freedom.

Now, that doesn't mean the government can't be a form organized greed as well. Usually these big bag corporations are operating evil in collusion with the government. So a case could still be made in weakening the government so that Goldman Sachs will have a weaker partner in all these games.

That's fine too. But we need stop dividing ourselves by worrying about freedom in abstract, and organize together to counter those that would thwart our freedoms in actual. Maybe one centralized federal government is not the answer. Maybe the state governments need to be the elemental organizing force (since it's easy for us to shop between American states).

Freedom needs to stop being the conversation-ender that it is right now. Freedom is a gradient. In the US right now, we have freedom to choose from 10,000 health insurance plans. In Germany, they have freedom to choose from like 30. But each of their 30 cost half as much to the government and to the people and provides equal, if not better, care.

Here's another slogan to add to freedom being such an annoying conversation-ender. It's this principle that's touted so often on Digg and Slashdot that it makes me nauseous:

That's a very macho thing to say, one that easily rallies the unattached twenty-something geek toward some heroic Clint Eastwood glorious independence ideal.

But really, what intimate relationship doesn't sacrifice freedom for security? Freedom is NOT the highest ideal. It's not even close. For the Right (and arguably the Left too), economic growth is the highest good, and freedom is an off-goal target that, when applied to market prices, just so happens to maximize economic growth (nevermind that having courts and a civil society also maximizes economic growth at the expense of freedom).