This thoughtful guest editorial in today's P-I gave me a new perspective. I hadn't thought to challenge the right-wing mantra that "freedom isn't free," but this Iraq war veteran counters that "everybody is free… at the simple price of being born as a human." Here's a short excerpt. I recommend reading the whole thing.
The nature of freedom apparently is too abstract for some people to grasp; at its dialectical core is a built-in paradigm that holds life as fundamentally sacred, and liberty as a God-granted right. Rights do not cost, only politics do. By charging for something that is free, politics has created a new form of "freedom capital," to be measured in blood and body counts and to be spent at the polls.