It costs other people's lives. I mean, the hero of the battle of Bennington, General John Stark, who said, "Live free or die," said it years after he had survived the battle. And Patrick Henry got Liberty, not death, although he at least had the balls to throw down his statement before the fact.
Thing is, we have no way of asking the dead what they think. Maybe they'd say, "I wished I'd ducked."
"Freedom isn't free" seems to have been adopted by the armed intervention crowd to signify that if you're too lily-livered to face hot fire, you don't deserve freedom. But the real work in a free society is in the boring wrangling, the voting, the educating,the frustration and the general pain in the ass of putting up with people who might be different from you.
Or we could just fight to the death. Freedom isn't free, you know. And death, as John Stark pointed out, is not the worst of evils. Of course he was alive when he said it.
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