What Is the Price of Freedom?

 The liberty principle for this Freedom Friday is the simple fact that freedom is not free. It comes at a cost. Americans are free because members of the Greatest Generation stood up and fought Germany and Japan to maintain liberty for themselves and their country.

The world has watched for a year as the people of Ukraine have fought for their freedom. When Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered his military to invade Ukraine, most of the world that that the war would be short. Yet, Ukraine is still fighting after a year, and Putin is caught between a war that he has not been able to win and the disgrace of conceding that he cannot win.

On the other side of the war, Ukraine has earned the respect of the world for its resistance to Putin’s invasion. The fighters in Ukraine know that their freedom rests on their continuing push to persuade Putin to pull his troops.

In an opinion piece, the Editorial Board of the Deseret News shared some of the lessons learned from the war in Ukraine. They stated in their article that the main lesson of the war is that “freedom … isn’t free.” They continued: 

Regimes that concentrate power in the hands of one person, or even one party, tend to seek power and territory for survival. They care less, if at all, about the ability of their citizens to pursue dreams, much less govern themselves.

The old Cold War struggle between free and oppressive regimes was just a latter-day extension of struggles that had occupied the world since the concept of freedom and democracy first emerged. It hasn’t gone away.

America’s constitutional system of government rests on the radical notion, boldly declared in the Declaration of Independence, of the “self-evident” truth that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights.”

By definition, man cannot revoke a God-given right. This notion interrupted millennia of assumptions that humans were subjects to a king or queen, or to a dictator, a political party or any other earthly source.

One of those unalienable rights is religious freedom – something many nations try hard to repress. Others include the freedom of speech, the right to assemble and many others enumerated in the Bill of Rights. More succinctly, the Declaration describes them as the rights to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

As the war in Ukraine shows clearly, freedom is not free. Often, the price of freedom is misery. Sometimes the price of freedom is blood, the blood of human beings who deserve to enjoy their rights of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” War is evil, and those who use it to gain fame or power are evil!