By Driss El-Hassan
In 1755, Benjamin Franklin wrote an appeal to the colonial Governor of Pennsylvania on behalf of the Pennsylvania Assembly. In his letter Franklin remarked, “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”
Franklin’s assertion was in response to an internal dispute within the Pennsylvania Assembly on the issue of levying taxes for the French and Indian War effort. The wealthy Penn family, the sole proprietors of the Pennsylvania colony, refused to accept taxes on their lands despite the increased threats to the colony
Franklin’s statement was in bold defense of a legislator’s right to self-governance in defense of the interests of its constituents, a profound problem in colonial America that later culminated in a bourgeois revolutionary war that permanently altered the course of history and founded our nation.
As time passed, monopoly capitalism in the US was established, became more powerful, and directed the eventual decline of the quality of public services across the country. Education, healthcare, infrastructure, are all underfunded and insufficiently resourced, with the working class footing the bill for nearly all of it without recompense.
Throughout the 20th century, the US made crucial strides in eliminating dangerous infectious diseases from the general public, substantially improving the freedom of people – especially children, the elderly, and the immunocompromised – to intermingle and engage in public life without fear of dying or becoming permanently disabled from diseases such as polio, measles, and smallpox.
These monumental achievements, however, are now being regressed.
After the fascistic president Trump appointed Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the US Department of Health and Safety, many physicians around the country raised concerns for the future of American public health, since RFK Jr. is a long-time anti-vaccine demagogue, with a lengthy history of strenuously undermining the credibility of child vaccination. Their concerns are vindicated.
On October 2, 2025, South Carolina’s Department of Public Health declared a measles outbreak which, at the time of this article’s publication, exceeds 950 cases. As of March 12, 2026, the US government’s Center for Disease Control (CDC) reported 1,362 confirmed cases of measles across 31 states.
It was only 26 years ago when measles was declared eliminated in the US. In the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, it only took the ultra-right less than 6 years to plunge the already vulnerable state of American healthcare into an even more dire crisis.
At a far-right libertarian convention in 2023, RFK. Jr. was interviewed about the Benjamin Franklin quotes he found most notable. He was prompted “Don’t you think the vaccines, the mandates, the prohibitions… [sic] is what bugged Americans?..” RFK Jr. responded, “It goes back to something else that Franklin said which is [sic] that warning us about the use of fear as a governing tool and saying that any society that trades a little bit of freedom for security is going to lose both and deserve neither.”
Of course, monopoly capitalists and their foot soldiers hardly ever turn their attention towards what freedom means for working people. After all, if Americans who are immunocompromised and rely on herd immunity live in an area with high rates of infectious disease transmission, how free would they be to leave their homes? How free would they be to enjoy spending time with friends and family? How free would they be to show up to work with no risks of contracting a dangerous illness? Of course, the definition of “freedom” monopoly capitalists use isn’t how working people define it. Freedom for monopoly capitalism means the unmitigated plundering of society via wage theft, corporate tax breaks, anti-labor union legislation, and the ability of monopoly capital to define what is and isn’t “healthy” for the general public on their own terms.
RFK Jr. cannot properly contextualize what Franklin asserted regarding freedom, as him and every other proponent of the MAGA movement would face a harsh reality: it is the security of the material conditions of society that begets freedom, not vice-versa.
