by robertsloan2

Created on: April 24, 2009

The concept of freedom is hardly overrated.

It's been severely underrated all my life. Yes. Laws do curb certain activities that nearly anyone would agree ought to be curbed - threats to life, property and health are pretty natural things to want to defend. But are you aware entire groups of people do not have any right to self defense?

Those considered mentally ill don't have the right to even verbal self defense without any trace of anger being considered pathological, however justified their complaints. Anything that happens, they can be easily railroaded for it. The people who think criminals who are consigned to institutions for the criminally insane get off lightly have never seen a psych ward or understood the conditions of one. Those people may often be in for life without parole, even if innocent.

Children in school do not have a right to self defense. In many, many schools, a child who's being physically bullied will be suspended right along with the bully if they get picked on and beaten up three times, on a "three strikes" clause. One teenager I knew took my advice about that and performed a nonviolent protest. He refused to hit the other kid back on his third time being beaten up. He was expelled from the school for getting in fights, something the bully of course wanted. Most bullies view suspension as a little earned vacation along with their fun.

Children also don't have a right to their earnings, even when they work in televison or they're Olympic level athletes whose earnings later on would be enough to set them up for life. At least one 18 year old athlete had to sue her parents for squandering the millions she'd earned. Child stars sometimes need to do that too.

Whole classes of people get deprived of even basic rights like that. But let's go beyond that to the philosophical point that freedom stops when it impinges on other people's life, liberty and property. I am not advocating that robbery, assault or murder should go unstopped.

The vast majority of laws aren't about those things anyway. They're about who you can marry. Who can inherit your stuff, which is yours and the state should not be able to decide as it does in some states that your blood kin are entitled to the lion's share of it however they treated you and whatever you think of them. What you can do for recreation when, ranging from substance use including quite harmless substances like marijuana or herbal supplements. What you can plant on your own land. In many towns you're required

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