PERSONAL FREEDOMS

The law says children aged zero to 17 must wear bike helmets.
Regardless of our age, we must wear seatbelts. With few exceptions,
you cannot smoke in a Cold Lake restaurant.

I am morally opposed to any legislation that dictates what is right
and wrong, laws that attempt to protect me from myself.

Even today's drug laws infringe on our personal rights. While I
believe that taking drugs is a stupid way to spend your evening, since
I don't have any legal claim on you, my opinion shouldn't matter. Your
taking drugs in the privacy of your own home doesn't infringe on my
property rights. After all, I think playing basketball and collecting
postage stamps are stupid, too. But those are decisions I can make
only for myself.

Despite continual subjection to claims about the evils of tobacco, for
example, or the dangers of not wearing a seatbelt, I am being told
that I am too incompetent to make up my own mind about these things.
Unfortunately, we take such insults on a daily basis.

What disturbs me the most is that so few others seem to acknowledge
how insulting all this is!

Soon the world will be filled with nothing but fools, politically
correct non-thinkers, everybody having the exact same views on
lifestyles, politics, abortion, homosexuality, religion, war, music,
anything and everything.

If you want to teach your children something of value, teach them
about freedom, not censorship. Persuasion, not regulation, are the
primary social values that we ought to choose to pass on to our
children ... whether they smoke or not, whether they do drugs or not,
whether they wear a bike helmet or not.