Freedom may not Make you Free

I’m in a studio apartment in the 15th district of Vienna. This is near the old home for me, a place I was in ministry for 7 years more than a decade ago. And a place I’m back to a couple of times a year. Where cultural differences once again leap out - particularly in regard to concepts of freedom.

From an American perspective Austrians lack some essential freedoms. You cannot, for example, own a gun or even buy ammunition without a license and a good deal of vetting. You can’t hunt on your own land without a game warden to tell you which animal to shoot. And fishing? You need a license for the country and one for each stream or lake. Which you can’t just buy. You have to take a course that costs nearly $1,000.

How about freedom from “search and seizure?” Well here the police can go through your car to make sure you have the mandatory safety equipment with or without a warrant. 

Overall the Austrians don’t particularly value freedom from the intrusion of the government. At some level it's pretty much omnipresent. Only a licensed electrician can change a fuse, and then only with one approved by the city of Vienna and unavailable at your local hardware store. But of course you have to pay him to come once a year and check everything. And similarly there is a mandatory annual check and cleanup of your chimney, including the one on your gas heater. (This is two different people. One checks but cannot clean. The other cleans if the checker sees a need.) 

The government also mandates that restaurants provide exact amounts of beverages and meat. Glasses are actually marked in 2 cl, 1/8th l, 1/4 l, and 1/2 l.  And all food is uniformly labeled. A mandatory code tells which food fits in a dozen or so categories of food allergies and intolerances, as well as uniform calories and cost per gram or kilogram rather than a vague USDA “portion.”   

Your personal car? Of course inspected once a year, but not just lights and emissions. It cannot be leaking oil or transmission fluid, nor burning it. And the mechanic that checks it doesn’t have dirty finger nails. He won’t even look at the engine until it's been steam cleaned so he can see leaks in the seals. But then you didn’t get your license to drive it until you were 21, and that after 3 years of probation and a $5,000.00 course. 

If you drive on the highway you’ll need to pay an annual fee. There are no “freeways.”

The government regulates noise levels in apartment building on various day of the week and times of day. Forget practicing a musical instrument on Sunday - it's a “quiet day.” And yes, that applies even if you own the place. 

The government mandates that you be a member of union and that you buy health insurance and invest in a government approved pension plan. And you don’t have any options. One size fits all. You don’t have the freedom to be uninsured. But notably, it isn’t government insurance. No medicare here, or medicaid. It's all private insurance companies who bid for the right to cover whole groups of workers.

Employers don't have the freedom to fire people without cause, or indeed without really good cause. In Austria a right to work actually means you have a right to keep your job if you are doing it. 

But then there are freedoms that Americans don’t have that Austrians take for granted.

Freedom to smoke, or own a business that allows smoking. Having lived under the Nazis Austrians have a strong sense of how various forms of moral puritanism quickly become a means of government oppression. You are also free to not go into a restaurant where people smoke. 

The freedom to choose you own physician? Absolutely. Austrians are far freer to choose their health care options than Americans.  There is no in and out of network. Every hospital or doctor that takes insurance takes it all. (A few have only private patients and serve primarily the rich and foreigners.) All insurance companies cover everyone. You can’t be turned down, not even if you are unemployed (its free.)

And so you have the freedom to get health care without driving yourself or your family into bankruptcy, or having to fund you cancer surgery with a kickstarter campaign.  Because through annual negotiations all insurance companies pay exactly the same amount for all procedures and all drugs, you have the freedom to go to the nearest pharmacy or hospital or doctor. Or not. The cost will always be exactly the same.

The freedom to take maternity leave and medical leave without losing your job or getting demoted. The freedom to keep you job, and to demand both reasons for being laid off and reasonable severance if you are. 

And you have almost total freedom from fear of being killed by a crazy person with a gun. Austria has the population of the DFW area and see fewer shootings in a year than Dallas has in a day.  

Other freedoms. You can buy beer or wine when you are 16, 14 in a restaurant if you are with an adult. But you’d better not drive. The allowable blood alcohol level is 0.0 until you are 21, and then about 1/4 of what is allowed in most states in the US. Which means you are almost free of the danger of getting killed by drunk driver. 

Not that you need to drive, because you have the freedom to get everywhere on public transport. As I write this I could, at this moment, get up, get dressed, and in 1/2 an hour be on a train to almost anywhere in Europe. I wouldn’t need my passport. (Schenken agreement) and there would be no TSA, no metal detectors, no wait, and no hassles. I wouldn’t even need to buy ticket in advance, since you can buy it on the train with a credit card.

I could get within a five minute walk of anyplace in Vienna, and that’s too much there are still taxis and Uber. In short you have the freedom to move almost anywhere without a car. In Dallas if you don’t have a car your only freedom is to walk most places.   

There are two basic attitudes toward government and freedom. One believes that the greatest threat to freedom is the government. That tends to be one subculture of the US, found strongly in the South and West. The other believes (along with 99% of Europeans) that government creates the possibility for freedoms that are otherwise impossible, such as freedom to travel, to be safe from harm, to have medical care, to live into old age without grinding poverty, to have workplace safety, to not be poisoned by the food you eat, or cheated by every merchant. These ideas are found in other US subcultures. And of course they are located in the choices we make about our political parties.  

But let me offer one freedom that we should all have: the freedom of choice that comes only when we are conscious of the choices we have to make. Most Americans have locked themselves into a belief that only one choice is the “American” choice, and thus accept living in a society of daily violence, increasing poverty, declining life expectancy, starving children, rampant homelessness, skyrocketing suicide rates, unattainable health care, and perpetual insecurity.

If you believe you only have one real choice? Well my friend you are not free.