Now you've shifted to a whole new argument. Your original argument was based on your experience with an illness a few years ago. You didn't want the recommended treatment, so you went and got an alternative treatment. You said that would be impossible if we had a national health system, because: a) the nat'l system would not offer the alternative treatment, and b) the free treatments it did offer would put all the alternative treatments out of business.

Now you're saying the nat'l system will offer the alternative treatment, but a private provider might do it better and you don't want to have to pay for a nat'l system you don't use, and that this is somehow a violation of your rights.

On that theory, everything the gov't spends money on that I don't like is a violation of my rights. Which means you're not a libertarian. You're an anarchist. Because if that theory were true, there could be no gov't at all.

There is nothing -- nothing -- any gov't could spend money on that somebody somewhere doesn't object to.

I don't want my tax money spent to maintain a defense budget that's triple that of Russia and China combined. I didn't want my tax money spent on a war in Iraq. That doesn't make the existence of the U.S. military a violation of my rights.

I don't have the right to insist the world (or the country) revolve around me and bow to my every wish. I have the right to express my preferences, to vote to make them policy, to protest if they aren't, to take my argument to the courts for redress if I think I have a case. But I don't have the right to win at any step along that path. When I lose, that is not a violation of my rights. And when taxes are levied and appropriated to pay for the programs I don't like, my rights are not being violated. Neither are yours.

(To head off misunderstanding: yes, there absolutely are rights that are guaranteed even against the will of the majority. The right to have my way on every policy isn't one of them.)

kuzi16:

...somehow its ok for the government to do that? ... i know, i know ... because i VOTED for them.

No no no. Wrong. Hugely, fundamentally wrong. Not because you voted for them. Because you voted, period. More accurately, because you had the right to vote, even if you didn't exercise it.

You got your say in the outcome, and so did everybody else. You lost. Others won. That is not a violation of your rights, nor is it mob rule. I don't know what you think a "REPUBLIC" is, but a system in which every citizen has a right to have his or her own way on every issue is not one. That's a system (if it can even be called a system) in which there's no res publica at all.

Nobody's trampling your rights. It's not all about you. Come down off the cross.

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