RALEIGH — During each election cycle, we are treated to an endless parade of politicians extolling freedom. Given how many of them subsequently vote to restrict our freedom in myriad ways, we have ample reason to be skeptical about politicians.
But we should not let our skepticism become cynicism, or realism become defeatism. The cause of freedom is not a sports team for whom we root but whose defeat does us no real harm. Nor is freedom simply an abstraction to which we should occasionally salute while going about our daily lives.
Freedom is of great practical value. The more government suppresses it, the poorer and unhappier its citizens become.
Back in the 17th century, France’s Louis XIV showed just how foolhardy it can be to restrict freedom. The “Sun King” ruled a mostly Catholic country with a significant Protestant minority, the Huguenots. After decades of religious conflict, Louis’s grandfather Henry IV had promulgated a new policy of toleration, the Edict of Nantes, in 1598. Under its protection, the Huguenot community had grown and prospered, producing a disproportionate number of the doctors, lawyers, financiers, and merchants of France.
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