Would you rather live an easy life with no freedom or a hard life with freedom? Why?

Life is supposed to be difficult. Earth is not heaven.

God allows difficult trials in us to teach us, to help us be stronger and be more faithful to Him.

A hard life with freedom. You can have a hard life with certain things getting in your way e.g job loses, mental illnesses etc but have freedom. I find with freedom your able to make your own mistakes so you will learn. To have an easy life with nothing ever going wrong for you yet having no freedom to explore would be a shame and it's probably why they have an easy life because their not able to make mistakes.

I think that many people have understood reality wrongly... freedom is earned. I'll take the child-parent situation to explain something. The job of a parent is to use their power over their children to favor their growth so that they may themselves be capable of sensible and thoughtful self-regulation. Basically, you alienate nothing if you prevent your child from doing something wrong he couldn't himself avoid because he would have otherwise been the puppet of his limited abilities.

To understand what we should do, see the world as a series of tasks and ordered personally in three separate groups which modify themselves as individuals evolve. The first set are acquired abilities: that's the series of thing you shouldn't bother helping your children with. The second one are abilities within the range of his grasp, provided he has the resources and the constraints -- that is to say, either help, lessons or a book on how to do something and being required to do a given task. The third are abilities beyond his grasp. It's something he couldn't possibly do before he gets sufficiently competent to make these abilities part of the second set.

A limit like when they should be to bed, how much they should eat or how to organize their schedule... those things are valid if they're in the third group. That's when you use your power to compensate for his incapacity. New tasks and challenges like having them make their bed to pick up the habit, having them clean the house, read a book, do maths, etc. Those should be set when the abilities are within the second set. What you shouldn't touch as a parent, but only could as a friend would be the first set. It may second a little simplistic, but I just vulgarized a very hard to grasp concept of developmental psychology to illustrate what is freedom and what is the value of authority.

Let's take a popular case in the US given the social reality: sexuality. Say you have a daughter and she's in her teenage years. A good idea might be to not allow her to get into her bedroom with the door closed and a guy. But say that you have a conversation with her and you realize she can be selective about her experiences and can keep it safe... even if she's 16, you should step back and tell her it's okay now if she wants to have a guy to stay at home. Why? Because she just proved you that your rule had now as only purpose that of preventing her from making a choice she can reasonably make.

Socially, it's a little different than that because you have people of many different kinds who are more or less well developed in many different ways. However, the same idea applies: governments have certain power over the population and they are justified so long as the population cannot by itself produce the same kind of utility. The analogy is also right in an other way: there are rules which should be changed since they do not allow people to grow -- many people seem to think punishing very harshly citizen when they commit crimes or students, when they do not behave properly, is a good idea... well, it won't work for many reasons, namely this one above, and what society sensibly do, if you followed, is that they punish people for their own incompetence as teachers and fellows.

There are many reasons and ways to show that systems aren't viable without rules, and even more to show that they are even morally justifiable. You asked us if freedom was better than ease... yes, it is, but you can only enjoy the freedom your development allows. That's why libertarianism falls apart at the face of science and empirical study: it's totally disconnected from reality and is very reductionist.

Easy life with no freedom, because the goal of life is to live easy; not to live for freedom.

Hard life with freedom. Hard life make us learn to survive and learn to appreciate. Freedom lets us explore the world.

Hard life with freedom

to have freedom it takes courage it takes balance it takes planning most people are bought and pay for and that is not freedom in my mind that is control

Princess Diana or Harriet Tubman ?

I'll punk out and say easy life,no freedom.

I can always subvert the oppressor.

i'd take the freedom any day over being in chains. there is no safety in those chains as you become a possession, no longer a person.

Philosophically speaking, I think we should not take serious things lightly and lighter things seriously. Moreover one should not mistake a right thing or wrongly interpret the misconceptions in mind. I think this is the basic reason for such confusions or doubts.