Civil Discussion – Huh?

When did wanting to be free make you the bad guy? When Patrick Henry said, “Give me liberty or give me death” did a crowd form to watch the hanging and divvy up his estate?

After a long, ultimately fruitless, attempt to dissuade a liberal thinker from advocating the use of state force to compel me to adopt his version of what’s right for my life and surrender control of my income to Barack Obama to feed the hungry, heal the sick and stop the rise of the oceans, I cursed. Whereupon I was asked to excuse myself from the dialogue, because I had breached the stated rules of the ‘civil discussion’ about matters of political thought.

My sign off is repeated below:

For the record, one last time:

A discussion in which one of the participants suggests that he or the state is justly possessed of the right to use force to coerce another man to act against his will or contrary to his interest (absent his having done so with regard to another man) does not qualify as a civil discussion, and I have no interest in giving that sort of discussion or any of its participants a moment’s further thought.

That you refrain from using profanity, while precious, does not change the evil premise of the discourse nor does it excuse the ugliness of your willingness, nay your promise, to enlist the state to use force to get your way, merely because a random number of people, comprising one more than 50% of those who showed up, pulled the same lever in the voting booth. Your irrational assertion that the outcome of an election justly endows you or the state with such power over other men is not supported by a second unsubstantiated assertion that your view of benevolence directed at the common good trumps my right to my life.

Now, depart from me or I shall once again fart in your general direction and taunt you yet again.  (OK, maybe that was pushing it, but cut me some slack.)

It is becoming unbearable to listen to the personal insults and the mockery of my wish to be free of other men’s illegitimate claims on my life. I have no quarrel with another man’s desire to help the poor or fund medical research the way he sees fit, I just ask that he stop putting the cost of his benevolence on my sons’ tabs. I ask for only one thing in return – the reciprocal favor, the right to be benevolent and alive on my terms without sending his children the bill. Seems fair, no?

Why is that so difficult for so many people to accept? Why am I greedy, heartless and evil for wanting everyone to dispose of his income as he pleases, whereas my former liberal friend wants sainthood for his willingness to use the IRS’s guns to confiscate “a fair share” of your neighbors’ money for the common good?