Liberty means what on the 4th of July?

I have never experienced such a spiritually vapid Fourth of July as this one now nearly gone by. I write at 10:40 at night. Colorful explosions continue to pock the night in Oakland's Temescal and San Francisco's Mission, Bernal, and Bay View districts. There's little evident joy in it, however. I hardly heard an "ooh' or an "aaah" from anyone over 12 while I was outside. Instead, fireworks just seem like cheap drugs for the young with money and the unemployed with nothing much to do tomorrow during commute time.

As usual for the past seventy years there was no righteous speechifying at Civic Center. As far as I know, no neighborhood groups sponsored solemn reflection on liberty. The closest the public came to patriotic awareness was the sound track at Lowe's playing Pete Seeger singing "If I had a hammer" and an elevator rendition of Woody Guthrie's "This Land is Your Land."

I will not kvetch, though. I'll throw you a bone. Please fetch.

Consider the Liberty Bell. Yes, the one in Philadelphia, first cast in 1751 in England for use in the colonies. That one cracked, and was recast in the New World, this time with the Biblical scripture "Proclaim liberty throughout the land" at its top. It is called the Liberty Bell because of that quote, not because, as is generally thought, it was rung to signal the beginning of the American Revolution. The true story is profound. And it's obscured by a superficial reading of the Biblical passage, and lost to simpletonian thinkers who discard the good sense of the Bible when they dismiss the book as being little but the nonsense of superstitious religion (which phrase many consider to be a redundancy).

The Biblical passage, "Proclaim liberty throughout the land" comes from Leviticus 25:10, in the middle of the best part of the world's earliest social constitution. The word Liberty in English comes across as pretty rhetorical in the phrase; however, a deeper reading, one exploring the Hebrew original, reveals the passage to be far from mere bombast or patriotic humbug. The liberty reference in Leviticus is to the Jubilee abolition of all debt and the restoration of the whole population to a sufficient amount of debt-free land such that every Hebrew could happily choose to refuse being an employee. Instead, each Hebrew family could make a satisfactory living on its own. When you can make a satisfactory living on your own, a prospective employer has to offer you something more than satisfactory wages to coax you off your homestead.

That, lovers of liberty, is what the Liberty Bell is truly about. It is about high wages that are the foundation of genuine free-choice making. Not through minimum wage laws. Not via tax revenue transfers to the needy. But by a recognition that access to land is key to a satisfactory livelihood. American Independence was achieved precisely because due west of Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and the Tidewater plantations of the southern colonies lay a whole continent of land liable to open acquisition by discontented Europeans.

Now, 240 years later, that continent is baled up with mortgages and land titles that exclude most of the population unless fealty is paid to the landlord. Pay or be displaced. Work like a drone, or move to smaller quarters or to the hinterland. In such circumstances, what would liberty, Leviticus style, look like? It bears your scrutiny, your time, to read the first major work of the 19th century San Franciscan, Henry George. In his 1879 inquiry into industrial recessions and depressions, Progress & Poverty, he identified the privatization of land rent as the great canker of society. He advocated for a near 100% tax on the potential rent of any given parcel of land. Using that social revenue to meet the needs of society would be a blessing, but so would be the abolition of private income got from mere ownership of the land beneath other people. Such a plan would result in debt-free land available for the willingness to pay the annual rent of that land.

Here and now, soon after July 4, 2016, is the best time for those who dream of the end of poverty to engage in an act of spiritual and intellectual renewal by acquainting themselves with the Liberty Bell story. You who dream of full-blown social justice that short-circuits the incendiary circumstances of so much that leads to violence and crime and withered humanity will be well-served by thoughtful consideration of the land question, and of its modern form, the socialization of land rent question.