VICTOR JOECKS: The difference between liberty and license

The Founding Fathers who fought for liberty wouldn’t recognize how people define the word today.

A recently released survey from the indispensable Institute for Family Studies shows vice has a vice grip on young men. Among men 18 to 29 years old, 27 percent view pornography daily and an additional 16 percent do so several times a week. Young men who frequently view pornography are about twice as likely to be lonely and depressed.

It’s not just young men doing things that would have been unimaginable a few decades ago. Public libraries host drag queen story hours, exposing little children to men pretending to be sexualized versions of women. School libraries have books so explicit that reading them out loud isn’t allowed at school board meetings.

After California decriminalized loitering in 2022, prostitutes brazenly walked city streets. The ACLU wants to “decriminalize sex work.”

A permissive attitude toward sex outside of marriage has dramatically changed family dynamics. In 2024, just under 40 percent of children were born to unmarried mothers. In 1940, that number was just 3.8 percent. That’s a 10-fold increase. Many of society’s most pressing domestic problems — poverty, crime and low student achievement — are downstream of broken families.

There have been occasional moments of progress. More than 20 states now require porn sites to verify user age. A few states now ban children from attending drag shows. The Trump administration has pursued some initiatives to boost marriage.

There’s little energy for large-scale efforts to deter these types of destructive behaviors. Sure, it’s bad that people are making choices that lead to the slow-motion breakdown of civil society. But the argument goes, they should be free to do so. After all, liberty means the ability to do what you want as long as it doesn’t infringe on someone else’s rights.

A lot of modern problems could be fixed with a bit of ancient wisdom. The same Founding Fathers who considered liberty an unalienable right didn’t define it so broadly. Just look at the 18th-century laws prohibiting adultery and fornication.

The Founders had a different name for unchecked liberty: license. Noah Webster’s 1828 dictionary, which was America’s first comprehensive one, defined license as an “excess of liberty; exorbitant freedom; freedom abused, or used in contempt of law or decorum.”

And they consistently warned against it. In a 1774 letter, future president John Adams wrote that people can be “led to sacrifice real liberty to licentiousness.”

“Civil Government is only a partial Restraint put by the Laws of Agreement and Society upon natural and absolute Liberty, which might otherwise grow licentious,” Letter No. 62 in Cato’s Letters states. While little-referenced today, that collection of 18th-century essays written by John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon was extremely influential in Colonial times.

“A frequent recurrence to fundamental principles, and a firm adherence to justice, moderation, temperance, industry, and frugality are absolutely necessary to preserve the blessings of liberty,” Pennsylvania’s 1776 Constitution stated.

Webster’s 1828 dictionary noted natural liberty doesn’t allow one to supersede “the laws of nature.” Civil liberty is “natural liberty so far only abridged and restrained, as is necessary and expedient for the safety and interest of the society, state or nation.”

Here is the practical reason that America’s founders opposed license. Those who abuse liberty are not merely making private decisions that affect only those involved. Liberty is rare, and license directly assaults the virtues and institutions that liberty requires to endure.

License affects other people because it undermines liberty for future generations. Next week, I’ll look at why socialism erodes liberty.