What is the Freedom Institute about and what are the goals of the organization?
Our purpose is to bring to local communities varied opportunities to learn about and live out the principles of freedom that gave birth to our country. The overall purpose of is to educate the people of SW Florida on the principles of the American Founding while offering practical applications of such principles. Our focus is in line with our Founding Father’s vision: local action and limited government.
One of the most fundamental assumptions about “social justice” in America since the late 1940s is that the government is preeminent in assuring the common good. We believe, however, that human freedom and private initiative in local communities can better produce lasting positive change in our society.
Historically, our culture attached a stigma to dependency. While people from all walks of life accepted the good purpose of private charity and even the occasional need for limited governmental support, even the poorest individuals avoided dependence on state-subsidized relief. Government agencies and private charities were considered options of last resort and were treated as alien to the community. Americans relied primarily on ‘reciprocal relief’, one given by neighbors in the same social and economic condition of the recipient and communicated through natural mediating institutions such as the church and the family. Charity was a private affair that solidified the bonds of family and community. We have gone a long way on the opposite direction since then. Unfortunately, we are now going in the opposite direction. That needs to stop.
How does someone go from being a communist to starting an organization like the FVI?
My father was a committed Communist, founding member of the Socialist Party of Puerto Rico. He was there on January 11th, 1959 when the Marxist-Leninist Puerto Rican Socialist Party, was formed. The FBI and the police intelligence Office became a continual presence in our lives. Socialism permeated everything at home. My father taught us that America was the enemy of humanity and it was our sacred duty to destroy her.
My admiration for socialist leaders became deep. Fidel was the Master and El Ché was the patron saint. Socialist Party leader Luis Lausell Hernandez won my great admiration for his uncompromising stance and activities during a strike against the National Electric company. I never forget his words at a rally: “We won’t leave anything standing here. We are willing to allow for all we once built with our very hands to fall if necessary!” I thought he was uncompromising and pure; willing to do anything to destroy what oppresses men. Only now, can I see, through the prism of a new understanding, that he only preached hate and death.
Soon I went to college to study political science intent on defeating America. I attended meetings of the Socialist Federation of College Students and participated in several sit-ins during a socialist-led student’s strike. However, I was also influenced by Catholicism as my mother occasionally sent us to mass with neighbors. My still strong religious interests came back to me after graduation. But how could I reconcile God and Marx? My answer I thought came as changes were brewing in Latin America. Liberation theology was on the move…
And what is a good Catholic and Communist boy to do? I joined the Jesuit Order of course! Their intellectual prowess and leftist leaning captivated my senses and enamored my will. I abandoned myself into the life of a Jesuit seminarian. Then, it occurred. News came through of the murders of six Jesuits and two nuns in El Salvador. An immediate result of the events was that we were not going to Sandinista Nicaragua for our philosophy studies as it was deemed too dangerous. The news hit me hard as I longed to go there. I soon departed.
I decided to continued my studies by going into ‘The Guts of the Monster.” I was admitted at the University of Southern Mississippi. But, Mississippi! Am I going to get lynched there or something? My senses numbed but the character of the decision fleshed out, I took that plane over the waters. Still a Communist, I landed in America where my lungs were filled with the breadth of TRUE freedom.
For the first time in my life, I began to weakly contemplate the possibility that things were not as I have been told. There I was, still spewing words of hate against America, and out of nowhere and based only on my achievements, I have been offered a full scholarship and many opportunities. Why? Why offer me any benefit at all? From then on, I had so many encounters with what freedom really is as America embraced me and gave me opportunities I never dreamt of. The fall of the Berlin Wall threatened to pierce another nail in the coffin of my self-confident ideology. One day I discovered that I was one of them.
I guess that in short, once you are confronted by the truth you can deny it or embrace it with the same conviction you once had in opposing it. When you reach a transforming truth, something possessing a renovating power, you cannot hide it from others. This Institute exist because now is the time to wave a new flag. Now is the time to defend freedom. The time is now to stand for the values at the founding of our country: Individual Liberty, Limited Government, Self-reliance, Faith
How many members do you have now?
We are new. Thus, we have not yet started to recruit many members but we have many supporters and volunteers. Our Board consists of 10 individuals and dozens of volunteers. We go to local communities to teach a series of lectures on the Founders, train staff of non-profits on how to effectively serve the poor, and go to churches to do the same. Additionally, we are developing an entrepreneurship education program for students.
Are you worried that freedom in America is being challenged?
Absolutely! However, the expansion of government has been occurring in our country for long. One of the most fundamental assumptions underpinning the treatment of social justice in America since the late 1930s is that the state is preeminent in assuring the common good. In my many conversations with leaders in local communities such assumption seems self-evident. The creation of a compassionate and moral society without the state at the front is a task that seems farfetched to many.
There is a fear of what is perceived as unavoidable long-term negative effects of free-market economics. Freedom brings inequality, they say, and we cannot tolerate that. Such great inequalities can be solved by the application of deliberate plans of action, which are geared toward assessing distribution, not production. This is what is called by the misnomer of redistribution of wealth or, to use the now popular phrase of our president, ‘spread the wealth around.’ Redistribution is often performed through confiscatory taxation where the property of one is given to another.
Ironically, under this view the receiver of confiscated property is entitled to its use at his pleasure while such ability is only acquired by depriving others from the ability of using their property as they see fit. The economic pie is static for collectivists and we need to just slice it thinner for some and wider for others. Some say that the so-called rich are almost by definition suspects of thievery. As we do not know if they earn all of that money fairly it is assumed that they may all be corrupt. Such social suspicion is at the heart of the collectivist confiscatory impulse. Social suspicion is foundational to all kinds of collectivism, from welfarism to communism. As individual property is suspect, and individuals cannot be trusted, government-imposed redistribution seems as a better alternative.
I think, however, that the Founder’s great achievement consisted precisely in limiting the federal government’s involvement in the affairs of individuals and local communities. I think that the framers of the Constitution established limits in the power of the Government precisely because they did not want to break free from the essential constraints that a truly free civil society places on government power. The Framers understood well what Lord Acton meant when he said that power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. They refused to hold the American people in the bondage of expansive government intervention. They rejected the rule by men with grandiose designs, even if they judged their ends to be beneficial. Collectivists want power to redistribute because they think it is a good idea; and, in the process, they rein in the spread of freedom that our constitution guarantees.
Do we have a plan for economic success in our Institute? Do we have a plan for poverty and compassion? Do we have a plan for a “war on poverty”? Yes. The plan is called freedom. The plan includes respect for individual dignity, self reliance, hard work, entrepreneurship, local action, caring for each other, and a government confined to its constitutional task of protecting our freedom.
What types of literature and other things are you trying to get out and how are you doing that?
We have a monthly gathering of like-minded individuals we call The Hour of Freedom. It is held at The Forest Country Club starting at 6pm. It is informal and offers a short lecture on an important issue. The next one is this coming March 25th and the topic is The History of Freedom: Finding our way back to America’s founding principles. It is free of charge.
Additionally, we bring a series of 8 lectures on freedom to local communities and your church. To schedule a lecture series in your community just go to our website at www.fvinstitute.org and click on the banner about our lectures.
We also offer media sessions with the showing of videos and documentaries about the Founders and freedom with discussion opportunities. With a membership, you can also receive literature on a variety of topics from our Institute and other collaborating institutes such as the Foundation for Economic Education and others.
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One of the best depictions of one of our greatest founders, John Adams, is the HBO miniseries about the 2nd president. I've watched is several times.
