Freedom Vs. Justice

I'm starting to wonder if part of the problem we're having in America is because we spend more time worrying about freedom than about justice. If you think about it, we can never have perfect freedom without becoming lawless. And yet we emphasize freedom so much here that it's like we're moving in that direction. We're more concerned about a person's freedom to privacy than with how to prevent and solve crime. We're more concerned about freedom of speech than we are with making sure the truth is known.

Freedom itself is hollow. It is given to enable us to do things. We don't have freedom for freedom's sake, but because freedom enables us to protect ourselves and others. But if all we're thinking about is freedom, we end up with the kind of abuses we've been seeing, where criminals go free on minor violations of their rights, and where parents are kept in the dark about their children because of the child's right to privacy.

Freedom and justice are inseparable. The reason our founding fathers emphasized freedom was because they saw the old government's system as being injust in its denial of certain freedoms. So there will always have to be freedom if there can be justice. But it seems we've been getting into trouble because we've been pursuing freedom for it's own sake.