Is not the right to have food and shelter about freedom? Sam wants the old status quo to continue ie of debt slavery to international banks and keeping the masses poor,ignorant and slaving in foreign corporate factories.

So let me get this straight, Sam thinks Egypt should stay a dictatorship because it's good for the economy?

So the lesson has to be learned again: you can't reliably get any options other than barely surviving or starving unless you have political and economic freedom. I didn't hear a lot of Rousseau or von Mises or [insert your favourite philosopher of freedom here] being quoted in the footage I saw, but the point is made nonetheless. Under a dictator you're always going to run out of bread and the circuses aren't much chop either.

Sam, you've set up a false dichotomy and your logic is stuck accordingly. Good luck with that.

"spiralling food prices, resurgent inflation, and growing income disparities between rich and poor"

Correct

"the absence of job prospects"

Correct

"Egyptians want him to pay the ultimate political price"

Correct

"So, why are they crying out for “freedom” and “democracy”?"

Um, well what would we do in Australia if the above situation was true? Thats right, replace the leaders at the next election. Egyptians do not have this option, thus the demonstrations.

I don't understand how the author could be so close, but yet so far.

There's an implicit idea here that there have been revolutions in the past where the rhetoric of liberty and freedom has been invoked sincerely, rather than as a device for more mundane and material ends.

If they exist and have produced lasting results, I'm not sure I can find them. The spirit of years like 1688 and 1776 were very much self interested political constituencies using useful rhetoric (and whose democracy was a painfully limited suffrage). Both may have created a better world, but it's foolish to believe that either was any less materialistic and self interested than those in Egypt. There's a reason both civil rights leaders and segregationists were plausibly claiming the mandate of the founding fathers in the 1960s whilst Rhodesian apartheid was adopting their rhetoric. Maybe they were sincere in 1789 and 1848, but the legacies of both these years is far more Napoleonic than liberal.
So yeah, the Egyptians are interested mainly in the mundane, but who in history has not been?