Freedom from want essential to the Founders – Quad-Cities Online

(Editor's note: Part three of a four-part occasional series about Norman Rockwells paintings the Four Freedoms)

The third of the Four Freedoms outlined by Franklin Roosevelt and illustrated by Norman Rockwell in the early 1940s, is freedom from want.

This freedom isnt explicitly spelled out in the Constitution like the first two -- freedom of speech and freedom of worship. Yet the freedom from want is perhaps implicit in the safeguards our Founders intended.

In the Constitution, the Founders prohibited the taking of life, liberty or property without due process of law. Likewise, they expressed in the Declaration of Independence our inalienable right to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.

What Roosevelt and Rockwell later referred to, in FDRs words, was an economic understanding which will secure every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants. When they suggested this in the early '40s, the U.S. was fighting Nazi Germany, which was systematically stripping people of rights, possessions, and even life itself based solely on race or creed. In this context, Roosevelts affirmation of a freedom from want became a direct attack on what Hitler represented.

In our own time, freedom from want stands for the belief that every person should have a reasonable opportunity for employment earning wages sufficient to support oneself and ones family. As jobs grow more scarce through technology advances and often pay less than a living wage, this basic freedom becomes harder and harder to assure.

Yet if we are to go beyond merely protecting the bare right to life, and instead assure the opportunity for each person to survive and thrive, well need policies and programs to educate our children and to create new jobs in which folks can be gainfully employed. Whats more, leaving this to the private sector alone wont work. In a constant race to the bottom line, businesses daily automate or outsource jobs and lay off workers to be more competitive with their rivals.

Government incentives and controls are needed to encourage investment in job training and creation that can move us toward the day when the freedom from want becomes a reality for all.

This does not mean folks who can work but choose not to should get a free handout. Instead, it means we should extend a hand up to all able-bodied workers -- like FDR did with the Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930s. This remarkable program generated hundreds of thousands of jobs and major public improvements, such as the wonderful buildings at Black Hawk State Historic Site we still enjoy today.

The point is, we cannot reasonably expect people to work and support themselves if decent jobs arent available.

Protecting the freedom from want is a tough challenge, particularly in an age where jobs give way daily to automation. But with all the public works that need improving across America -- from roads to railroads to schools to bridges to energy farms -- there are a vast number of potential jobs that could both make America stronger and allow folks a living wage to move us towards securing the freedom from want.

As this series on the Four Freedoms suggests, we will need to work together and embrace what unites us to make this freedom alive and real for us all.

Mark W. Schwiebert, an attorney, served as mayor of Rock Island for 20 years.

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Freedom from want essential to the Founders - Quad-Cities Online