Liberty
Slavery is illegal in the United States, but the vast majority of us still are not free.
The federal holiday Juneteenth celebrates the day (June 19, 1865) when enslaved people in Galveston, Texas were informed that they were free. Technically they had been free since the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, but legal rights don't mean anything unless they are enforced. And so I like to think of Juneteenth both as a celebration and as a warning about liberty.
It wasn't until I read American Nations, by Colin Woodard in 2021 that I really understood that people could have completely different ideas about what liberty might mean depending on the ideas of the settlers in that area. In the South, liberty means freedom from constraints on behavior, like the rule of law that requires equal treatment of people. In practice, though, this means that only those with power are able to act freely. Since power is a relative concept, that means liberty is too, and is by definition constrained for all but a subset of people. For example, everyone should have the freedom from constraints to bodily autonomy, especially ones that are an immediate threat to one's health. But in those places that prioritize freedom from constraints, women are denied the right to choose whether to have children once they are pregnant.
In the North, liberty means the freedom to do something, like speak freely or practice one's religion. In practice, if we prioritize the freedom to do something, that means that we have to refrain from punishing those who engage in those actions. We constrain ourselves to respect the rule of law. From the perspective of liberty as freedom from constraints, no one is free. I'd argue, though, that rule of law frees us from worrying about power dynamics. We have more choices and hence are more free.
As an economist, this seems like a strange debate, though, because everything we do is the result of constrained optimization. We want to do things (freedom to) but have budget constraints (lack of freedom from). There is no getting away from constraints, because we have chosen to have an economy that relies on exchanges with others.
From the beginning of Texas as a separate political entity (first as a republic, then as a state), it put the liberty of white people to enslave others over the liberty of everyone to live freely. It seems like a perversion of the term to say liberty is really about the freedom of a white adult males to get to do whatever the hell they want. According to the US Census, in 2022 there were around 330 million Americans, with around 250 million people of voting age. Just under two-thirds of the population is white. Half the population is women. Non-whites are disproportionately targeted by the the police and have no ability to protest incarceration. Women don't have control over our bodies. That means the vast majority of us truly are not at liberty to go about our daily existence. So I celebrate Juneteenth, but the fight for liberty is far from over.