Your Civil Liberties....where do you draw the line

[gry60]

But you don't think this is slightly sensationalizing the whole thing? Like cigarettes are bad, fast food is bad, some sort of restriction on them isn't necessarily a bad thing. I know it's an incredibly fine line to walk on helpful restriction vs infringement on rights. I appreciate the opinion because I am open to the whole matter really.


After seeing the people in boston getting kicked out of their homes and yelled at by the cops at gun point it got me thinking like if some 19 year old was on the loose or not...i wouldn't want them doing that to me or my family....maybe i should do something about this...then (like most) i was like well its over now....moving on

cigarettes are choices, eating fast food is a choice.  those are freedoms that we as americans should be able to enjoy or not enjoy without having the government TELL us we can or not.  we know cigs are bad, we know fast food isn't healthy, we know guns in the wrong hands can be deadly but we shouldn't be FORCED to do anything either way because that's not what we were founded on.  i seen a story of a teenager who has eaten nothing but mcdonald's fries since she was a little girl and eventually had to go to the hospital for all sorts of ****.  guess what?  her choice.  should the government have 'saved' her from herself? nope!  let that girl cook (and die, eventually) it's her right as an american.  i want less regulation.  i want less 'monitoring'.  i want the government focused on helping the people in beneficial ways not attempting to strong arm all of us in the direction of their choosing.  they're supposed to work for US, not the other way around.

Your post highlights the main flaw with the way we understand "freedom" in America: we tend to base our decision-making on whether or not we are allowed to do what we want to do without much regard to the consequences of the action. The problem is, consequences not only follow, but they affect the decision maker AND the people around him/her. By saying that we want less regulations on things that have the potential to harm us or our neighbors, we are implicitly refusing to acknowledge that our individual actions can affect a bigger group of people to whom we never gave the choice to share the consequences of said actions.

In your story about the little girl you say the government shouldn't have saved her. Isn't one of the duties of the government to protect its citizens? If not, why do we even have an army?