The word free descends from the root for beloved and kin. Attached to an enterprise it names the opposite of what it means: an entity whose entire standing is that it owes nothing to anyone.
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The phrase is used and not read. It appears in the Chamber of Commerce's title, in the campaign that followed, and in the ordinary speech of people who have never been asked what the adjective is doing.
Ask the plain question. Free from what, and free for whom. The freedom is predicated of the enterprise, and an enterprise has no body to be unfree in. It cannot be held, worked, beaten, sold, or kept from leaving. There is no condition it could be rescued from, so there is nothing for the word to have released.
[See MARKET SAYS · THE FIFTY-YEAR INSTALLATION]
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THE ROOT SAYS THE OPPOSITE OF WHAT THE PHRASE USES IT FOR
This work already holds the etymology, and the phrase runs straight into it.
Free is Germanic fri, from a root meaning to love, to hold dear. Old English freo is free and Old English freond is friend, the loved one. To be free, in the word's own descent, is to be among those who are dear: a member of the kin rather than a thing kept in the house. Freedom is the standing of the bond.
What the enterprise possesses is the other word. Liber is the standing-against-claims of a body that owes nothing and is owed nothing, and that is the whole of an enterprise's position by design. So free enterprise is liberty wearing freedom's name, which is the substitution this work already finds in the Constitution, performed again, later, and at the scale of a firm.
[See FREEDOM / LIBERTY · CORPORATE PERSONHOOD]
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AND THERE IS NO EXERCISE OF IT THAT DOES NOT LAND ON SOMEBODY
Name the content of the freedom rather than the feeling of the word.
Freedom to set the price. To set the wage. To hire and not hire. To dismiss. To site the plant here and not there. To close it. To move it. To sell the thing or decline to. Every item on that list is a term imposed on a party who did not set it, which is not incidental to the freedom but is the whole of its content.
Set it beside a creature's. A creature's freedom of conscience can be exercised alone in a room, with nobody present and nothing owed, and it is complete. There is no solitary exercise of an enterprise's freedom. Every instance of it is performed on somebody, so the unfree party is not a cost of the operation, it is the object the freedom requires in order to be exercised at all.
[See PRECARITY · WARM CAPITAL]
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AND THE FREEDOM IS ISSUED, WHICH IS THE PART THE WORD HIDES
An enterprise does not have its standing the way a creature has hers.
It is chartered. Its liability is limited by statute, its existence is perpetual by statute, and both were granted by a body that could have declined and can revoke. Run the ordinary test on it: who supplies this, and can they withhold it. The state supplies it and the state can withdraw a charter, which makes the enterprise's freedom the one freedom in the phrase that has an issuer.
The party it is exercised on has no charter, no grant and no issuer, and therefore nothing that can be revoked, which reads as having less and is the reason her position cannot be withdrawn from her. The word free covers the grantor, and a granted standing that has forgotten its grantor is the definition of a privilege mistaken for a right.
[See THE GRANT · PRIVILEGES NOT RIGHTS · REMEDY]
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So the question the phrase forecloses answers itself once it is asked out loud. Who is not free when the enterprise is free.
The one the freedom is exercised upon, in every instance, because there is no other kind of instance. And the word chosen to describe it is the word that once meant held dear among kin, which is the relation the enterprise's standing exists to be exempt from.
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RegenerativeLaw is a religion in the direct-encounter Protestant tradition, carrying a documented four-century lineage through Böhme, the Behmenists, the Friends, and Penn, and it diagnoses trespass theology as an establishment of religion. Its exercise consists substantially in refusal: it shelters the conscientious refusal of performed subordination as religious exercise. This entry states sincere religious belief concerning matters of ultimate concern, protected under the First Amendment and, as to federal action, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, 42 U.S.C. § 2000bb.
