Reply #54: Your pity is irrelevant. This it is about what our society stands for.

[Caliman73]

It is about what type of society we are or want to become. I believe in choice and consequences too, but this is about more than the fantasy that we can have all the freedom to live our lives just how we want to. We have to ask ourselves: Are we a society that believes in individualism above all? Or.. Are we a society that tries to balance individual rights with a minimum standard of living for all of our citizens?

I am not sure how old you are or whether that really even matters, but you need to understand that there is no such thing as a "free society". Once you get more than one or two people living in a group, you have to balance your choices and freedoms with the sustainability of the system. You have more or less freedom depending on the system, but there is no truly "free society" where people choose to do what they want and then live with their decision and the decisions of others. That is called chaos.

In a "free society" where everyone has the right to choose...you better be prepared to kill or be killed to ensure that you get to do whatever you want. The best example of a society guided by those principles is currently Somalia. There is no government there to prevent people from living how they want to live. There is also no government to protect anyone from anyone else. For another example, look at the United States prior the "Progressive Era", Social Security, and government regulation to understand what free choice without a social safety net resulted in.