U.S. celebrating 250 years of liberty, not license. There’s a difference

Americans famously are lovers of liberty. This year we celebrate 250 years of enjoying historically unprecedented civil, economic, and religious liberty.

Liberty, though, is an easily misunderstood concept, and our country’s 250th anniversary is a timely occasion to remind ourselves what it truly means. If we allow our collective understanding of liberty to decay into “the ability to do whatever we want,” we should not expect to enjoy it for another 25 years, let alone another 250. And we have reason to worry.

According to a 2024 survey of more than 3,000 undergraduate students by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (Losing America’s Memory, 2.0), 60 percent of participants did not know the lengths of congressional terms in office and nearly half mistakenly thought the president, not Congress, has the constitutional authority to declare war. ACTA’s 2026 Broadside for the Nation report calls on colleges and universities to offer an undergraduate course specifically designed to combat this erosion of civic memory.

Ignorance of basic facts about the Constitution is of course troubling; the Constitution is, after all, how we preserve liberty through governance and law. Yet rise of an even more alarming ignorance has gone largely unnoticed. I speak of an ignorance not of the legal structure of the Constitution but of its moral structure, the standards by which we judge laws as good or bad.

This summer I had the privilege of speaking to the entire incoming class of freshmen at the University of West Florida, in groups of 100-200, about the importance of free speech and civil discourse. To clarify the nature of freedom of speech, I asked if anyone could tell me the distinction between liberty and license. To my utter amazement, all I received were blank stares. Not a single student in the incoming class could give me an answer; most seemed bewildered by the question.

I used a simple analogy to make the point: someone of legal age having a beer with their friends enjoys liberty; someone drowning in alcoholism is licentious. Likewise, someone standing in the campus quad politely discussing immigration policy with willing interlocutors enjoys liberty of speech; someone shouting expletives at passersby practices license. In both cases, the alcoholic and the heckler are not free—they are miserably enslaved to alcohol and to impassioned rage respectively.

I have every reason to assume that ignorance about the distinction between liberty and license extends well beyond one freshman class at my university. How can we expect young people to mature into citizens who can “keep the republic”—to hearken back to Benjamin Franklin’s legendary warning—if they do not understand this fundamental distinction?

This distinction was central to the thinking American founders and the writers of liberty who shaped them. A few examples:

John Locke wrote that even the state of nature is “a state of liberty, yet it is not a state of license” (Second Treatise of Civil Government, 1690).

The Baron de Montesquieu — so influential among the founders — observed that “It is true that in democracies the people seem to act as they please; but political liberty does not consist in an unlimited freedom. In governments… liberty can consist only in the power of doing what we ought to will, and in not being constrained to do what we ought not to will” (The Spirit of Laws, 1748).

Edmund Burke declared that “Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites… It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters” (Letter to a Member of the National Assembly, 1791).

The Puritan John Winthrop distinguished “natural” liberty—“a liberty to do evil as well as to good… common to man with beasts”—from “civil or federal” liberty, “a liberty to that only which is good, just, and honest… maintained and exercised in a way of subjection to authority” (“Little Speech on Liberty,” 1645).

John Adams warned that “I would define liberty as a power to do as we would be done by. The definition of liberty to be the power of doing whatever the laws permit, meaning the civil laws, does not appear to be satisfactory, but I would rather refer you to other writers than to anything of my own… Locke, Montesquieu, and even Hobbes, are worth consulting” (Letter to J. H. Tiffany, March 31, 1819).

George Washington cautioned that “arbitrary power is most easily established on the ruins of Liberty abused to licentiousness” (“Circular Letter to the States,” 1783).

On this 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, we should also recall that the founders’ assertion of a right to throw off oppressive government for the sake of liberty was framed under the authority of “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God,” guided by prudence, and submitted ultimately to “the Supreme Judge of the world.” It was not a mere assertion of will but a claim of moral right and duty.

In a republic, we are free to make our own laws. That freedom is full of both promise and peril. The choice remains ours — at least for now — and it is always a moral one: liberty or license.

This piece was originally published by Pensacola News Journal on September 19, 2026.