It's not about contraception (addendum)

Matter of fact, you know that transportation bill into which the Roy Blunt not-about-contraception legislation is to be folded as an amendment? It has another remarkable provision that

would strip several thousand workers within the rail-industry of their federal minimum-wage and overtime protections, potentially making low-wage jobs pay even less.

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Listed in the bill under the heading "Technical Correction," provision 6602 would exempt several companies who transport rail workers from their obligations under the Fair Labor Standards Act, the 1938 law that guarantees basic worker rights. The carveout would allow a handful of boutique contractors to pay no overtime to their drivers who haul rail workers between worksites, often driving long distances of 300 miles or more. (Huffington Post)

There's just no little structure of decency so small that they won't sooner or later be probing it for weakness and trying to wear it down. In the name of Freedom (only for those who went to the right schools, so they'll know how to use it).

Digby sends us to a wonderful way of understanding why the libertarian idea of liberty is so restricted, in the writing of the Prince of Austrianism, Ludwig von Mises, as expounded by Mike Konczal. What Konczal is particularly interested in (and with good reason!) is the objection of this particular libertarian to the concept of Free Love, in the 1922 monograph on Socialism.

Free love is the socialist’s radical solution for sexual problems. The socialistic society abolishes the economic dependence of woman which results from the fact that woman is dependent on the income of her husband. Man and woman have the same economic rights and the same duties, as far as motherhood does not demand special consideration for the woman. Public funds provide for the maintenance and education of the children, which are no longer the affairs of the parents but of society. Thus the relations between the sexes are no longer influenced by social and economic conditions… 

Just as the pseudo-democratic movement endeavours by decrees to efface natural and socially conditioned inequalities, just as it wants to make the strong equal to the weak, the talented to the untalented, and the healthy to the sick, so the radical wing of the women’s movement seeks to make women the equal of men….But the difference between sexual character and sexual destiny can no more be decreed away than other inequalities of mankind.

So you see everybody should be free, but some of us aren't really as equipped by nature and society for having quite as much freedom as the rest—like women. And any artificial attempt to level these inequalities is doomed to fail; the same goes for economic socialism, threatening the natural inequality between those who own property and those who don't.

Thus, when they're talking about the importance of freedom, they're only talking about those to whom it is important: the masters, the men of property. (And when they start talking to you about the "ownership society", watch your wallet, because their plan isn't for you to actually own anything, but to think you do, while you will really be bound to your house-and-mortgage like a serf to the soil...)

Hamburg Staatsoper 1970; Bruno Maderna conducting.