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This is a matter of degree. The US is freer than North Korea or China. And within the US, some places are clearly freer than others.
Characteristics of a free society include:
The ability to privately own guns and other weapons sufficient to enable the violent overthrow of a tyrannical government;
Free speech and free association;
All adult humans are equal before the law and are entitled to due process and the presumption of criminal innocence;
The right to engage in consensual transactions and to dispose of one's property as one chooses without permission;
The right to bind oneself with enforceable contracts.
Given a choice between a good thing and a bad (or less good) thing, a person with full information who is able to freely choose between them will prefer to choose the good thing. This is the definition of "good" I am operating under.
There are systems where a single central authority has a massive amount of power to make cultural decisions (e.g. North Korea, Spain in the 1500s, Iran), and there are systems where cultural authority is more distributed and less centrally powerful, e.g., the US. I would prefer even less centralized cultural power than currently exists in the US, but again it is a matter of degree.
Centrally planned economies like Soviet Russia and North Korea produce little wealth and generally cause massive amounts of starvation. They also tend to produce untrue ideas at a high rate, such as Lysenkoism. Decentralized economies like the US produce comparatively more wealth, less starvation, and more empirically correct ideas. It is a matter of degree, but the degree of difference is extremely large.
It is a means. If you demonstrated that freedom and openness have a higher likelihood of causing bad outcomes as compared with another specific alternative system, I would change my view. However, I consider the empirical evidence in favor of freedom to be overwhelming, so I would require a considerable amount of evidence in the other direction.
The degree to which power is centralized, and the kinds of power that such central structures have, clearly vary in different times and places. I don't think it's possible to eliminate central power, but I think it is possible to considerably reduce the influence of central power and to place checks on the exercise of such power (e.g. via the private ownership of the means of war).
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