Freedom Isn't Free • Lucky For Some

Did you ever watch Team America from the creators of South Park? That movie was awesome for so many reasons but I think at the time I didn’t fully get it. It was a hilarious satire of America hegemony and the desire to constantly be the police of the world. I was thinking about this song in the movie (yes it’s a pseudo-musical) Freedom Isn’t Free which plays on this idea that freedom, as implicitly inferred in American Liberalism always has a price. Now, if you’ll bear with me here, we can extend this and think a little bit more about the idea of freedom in Capitalist Democracies what the price actually is.

We’re sold a powerful narrative about freedom of choice, personal responsibility, and unlimited potential. “You can be anything you want to be!” they tell kids in school. “The only thing holding you back is yourself!” cry the motivational speakers. “If you just work hard enough, you’ll succeed!” insist the politicians.

This is the supposed social contract: Work hard, obey the law, pay your taxes and you can aspire to be a land owning proletariat like those that went before you.

There’s an uncomfortable truth that we’ve seen emerge, particularly in the post COVID years where rising global debt has eroded your purchasing power while enrich the few. That is this, your freedom is only what you can pay for.

You may have a skerrick of “free-will” in what you do, but your social status, and subsequent freedoms are heavily determined by the country and postcode you are born in, the wealth of your parents and their ability to afford to PAY for your education, healthcare and even the simple necessities of your life.

Your “free will” - that is your ability to make choices and determine your path in life - is heavily constrained by factors far beyond your control. From the moment you’re born, your freedom is shaped (or more accurately curtailed) by your socioeconomic status, your postcode, your parents’ education level, your access to quality schooling, and countless other variables that you never chose.

Think about it. How “free” is your choice really when:

You can only afford to live in areas with underfunded schools
Your career options are limited by the education you could access
Your health decisions are constrained by what you can afford and your pathologies are pre-determined by your genetics
Your job options are determined by where you can afford to live
Your ability to save or invest is eaten up by basic survival costs

This isn’t just about economic determinism - it’s about the very nature of freedom itself. In a system that commodifies every aspect of human existence to extract rents and profits from your presence in the world.

The real social contract is this: Freedom = Purchasing Power.

Your ability to make meaningful choices - where to live, what to eat, how to spend your time, how to care for your health, how to educate your children - is directly proportional to your capacity to pay for those choices. The system doesn’t just limit your options; it actively creates the illusion of choice while funnelling you down predetermined paths based on your economic status.

So yes, freedom isn’t free - at all. The real price of freedom in our current system is measured not just in dollars, but in the grinding reality that true freedom remains a privilege reserved for the fractional few that can afford it. The rest of us? We’re just free to choose between the options we can afford, which for many, isn’t much of a choice at all. Maybe it’s time we stopped pretending otherwise and started having an honest conversation about what freedom really means in a world where everything - including our choices - comes with a price tag.

Banner image by Black Forest Labs

Model: Flux Ultra v1.1

Prompt: Sinister abstract art piece of an individual/proletariat exchanging their freedom for a token of exchange