[slg]

The biggest problem is the quote is now used to set up a false dichotomy between safety and liberty when it was originally more about balancing short and long term priorities. Franklin was simply making a quip about the legislature considering the deal from the Penn family. He meant something along the lines of "people who give up their rights to self governance for temporary safety don't deserve either to govern themselves or be protected" He was basically responding to the potential deal with "do you think we are stupid cowards?" or a slightly more eloquent version of "do you think I was born yesterday?"

[jessriedel]

I still don't see the problem. It is a well known argument that liberties are tend to ratchet down (never up), so that any time you give up your liberties for some new threat (say, terrorism) you are making a short-term/long-term trade off.

The biggest difference was just the Franklin was talking about self-governance rather than individual civil liberties, both these are obviously closely connected. I think your version ("people who give up their rights to self governance for temporary safety don't deserve either to govern themselves or be protected") is very compatible with the sense in which this quote is used by modern civil liberties proponents.

[slg]

I think the idea that civil liberties always ratchet down is very debatable if not flat out wrong. The only people who were guaranteed civil liberties when Franklin said that quote were wealthy, white, heterosexual, protestant men. We have certainly improved things since then.

I am also not ready to categorize terrorism as a sort term issue. I don't foresee anyway the War On Terror ever really ends without us simply abandoning it. In my mind the modern argument should be more about the effectiveness of abridging civil liberties than about the temporary nature of the threat (which was one of the central points of Franklin's quote).

[jessriedel]

Yes, obviously when we founded a new country through a violent revolution grounded ideologically in civic freedoms, those freedoms increased. The racheting effect is only argued to occur within a given government, i.e., between revolutions or other massive shocks.

I agree that some nuances having to do with time frames were lost when this was converted to a slogan; I think we just disagree on whether this is critical. You're right that the War on Terror never ends, but that supports my point: the actual threat of terror is small and transitory, but the machinery created to fight it (including the curtailment of freedoms) persists indefinitely.