Manufacturing Freedom

This is a term Michel Foucault suggests in his January 24, 1979 lecture at the College de France:

...There must be free trade, of course, but how can we practice free trade in fact if we do not control and limit the number of things, and if we do not organize a series of preventative measures to avoid the effects of one country's hegemony over others... Similarly, there must be freedom of the internal market, of course, but again, for there to be a market there must be buyers as well as sellers. Consequently, if necessary, the market must be supported and buyers created by mechanisms of assistance... We have then the conditions for the creation for a formidable body of legislation and an incredible range of governmental interventions to guarantee production of the freedom needed in order to govern.
Broadly speaking, in the liberal regime, in the liberal art of government, freedom of behavior is entailed, called for, needed, and serves as a regulator, but it also has to be produced and organized... Liberalism is not acceptance of freedom; it proposes to manufacture it constantly, to arouse it and produce it, with, of course, [the system] of constraints and the problems of cost raised by this production.

(from The Birth of Biopolitics, Graham Burchell, translator. Pgs. 64/65)

It is a question of equilibrium: what is the least amount of governmental intervention necessary to maintain a free market arena wherein natural economic forces sustain the utility of the populous. This would be the problem that the meeting of the G-20 concerned itself with today.

Foucault continues...

What, then, will be the principle of calculation for this cost of manufacturing freedom? The principle of calculation is what is called security... the liberal art of government is forced to determine the precise extent to which and up to what point... individual interests insofar as they are opposed to each other, constitute a danger for the interest of all. (Pg. 65)

In this light, here is some speculative musing on what really might be on the minds of the G-20:

The problem is the masses, both at home and abroad. Imagine an overpopulated planet where the over populating species manages to create technologies which will theoretically allow them to live forever. The problem is the population explosion, which started with 20th Century medicine, and is now set to topple with looming 21st Century medical advances. But there is a solution that they seem to be employing...