Consider the following comments on freedom and security.
Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
Benjamin Franklin
I prefer dangerous freedom over peaceful slavery.
Thomas Jefferson
Freedom is not worth having if it does not include the freedom to make mistakes.
Mahatma Gandhi
A person who is starving or afraid is not free in any way that matters, whatever rights they hold on paper.
We rarely surrender our liberties all at once, we trade them away in small, reasonable-sounding instalments.
Write a piece in response to one or more of these comments. Your essay will be assessed on the quality of your argument and the way you express it.
A way into this prompt
A defensible thesis is that freedom and security are not opposites to be traded one for the other, but conditions that each depend on the other being adequately met. Open by acknowledging the libertarian instinct, that liberty surrendered for safety is rarely returned and often was not worth the bargain. Then complicate the picture: a person gripped by hunger or fear enjoys little real freedom, so a baseline of security is a precondition for liberty rather than its rival. A useful third move examines who decides the trade, since the powerful tend to keep their freedoms while restricting everyone else's. Caution: resist the comfortable absolutism that any limit on liberty is tyranny, which ignores how shared rules can widen freedom rather than shrink it.