# Sacrificing liberty for security is the basis of laws One could say that true freedom only exists in complete anarchy. Indeed, I am free to do however I please, but so is everyone else. In particular, everyone is free to detain me, to torture me or even to kill me, effectively depriving me of my own freedom. This is obviously not ideal to me, and that is why we have devised laws to prevent this from happening. While I am not allowed to do any of those acts to my neighbour, neither can he, and one can argue that this in effect increases both liberty and security, in that nobody is allowed to deny their neighbour's freedom and our physical integrity is guaranteed under the law. As a sidenote, the original quote by Benjamin Franklin was written as follows: > Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. While it is often used to promote individual liberties and to demonise the evil state, always hungry for more power, Franklin wrote that quote for an almost opposite reason.[^1] Indeed, he used it during the French and Indian War, as a representative of the Pennsylvania Assembly, in a letter to the colonial governor of Pennsylvania to defend his right as a legislator to levy tax on the Penn family (the "essential Liberty"). The mentioned "little temporary Safety" is the cash offered by the Penn family for the defense of frontier to evade taxes. Franklin was essentially blaming the governor for suggesting the Assembly should renounce its right to self-governance in exchange for physical defense. --- ## 📚 References - Monsieur Phi. ["Un peuple qui sacrifie un peu de liberté pour un peu de sécurité..."](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BT-ZsfT2Sn8) 2020. YouTube. [^1]: 'What Ben Franklin Really Said'. _Lawfare_, 15 July 2011, [https://www.lawfareblog.com/what-ben-franklin-really-said](https://www.lawfareblog.com/what-ben-franklin-really-said).