One of the great errors of freedom people (myself included) is that we’ve sometimes based our arguments on less-than-optimal grounds.
What I mean is that we argued for freedom on political or legal grounds. And while those arguments were generally accurate and valid, it was a relatively poor line of argument.
Our arguments on economic grounds were somewhat better, but they still missed the largest and clearest areas of human experience.
A stronger strain of argument, in my opinion, involves happiness.
Defining Happiness
Happiness, of course, is a subjective thing. A new car might make one person very happy but be a burden to another (or to that same person at a different stage of life).
Furthermore, happiness is very often temporary. People think they’ll be happy if they win the lottery, but that rush of happiness lasts only a short time, then fades away. Lottery winners are happier than other people for a few weeks, then they return to normal – or worse. The same goes for similar cases.
Long-term happiness is what we would be wisest to pursue. But this type of happiness – which we generally think of as satisfaction – requires things of us. In particular, it requires good choices, the courage to make them, and good information to base them upon.
The best definition of the long-term happiness I know is a paraphrase of Aristotle. It goes like this:
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