Desires For Freedom

Desire for Freedom and Desire for Limitations on Freedom

People have the desire for freedom as well as a desire for limitations on their freedom. Freedom and the limitations on freedom are both needed to live peacefully. Absolute freedom cannot be achieved because when you take away limitations you take away a freedom. With out rules governing our society, people would be able to do what they want to each other with out fear of punishment. An examination of the advantages and disadvantages of both arguments helps this become clearer.

One of the major reasons freedom is so desirable is because many of the limitations on freedom are disallowing humans the right to have control over their bodies. Control of the human body is the only thing that people have power over. A large number of the prohibited freedoms are crimes where the criminal makes himself the victim. For example, the use of drugs, prostitution, suicide, vagrancy, minor in possession, dodging the draft, entering the country illegally, and disregard for the age limits set on the purchase of pornographic materials. All of these crimes are punishable under the law. These crimes are set apart from most others because the person willingly chooses to victimize themselves (An exception can be made sometimes in the case of prostitution if they are being forced to prostitute against there own will). What people choose to do to themselves, in my opinion, is the least of our worries as a country. The last thing the government should have control over is what you choose to do to yourself. As long as you are not directly harming anyone else in the process, the government should not waste their time and money on something that is so trivial in comparison to crimes involving a victim. In general, people do not agree with the government controlling what they can and cannot do to themselves. It should be no one's decision but the people if they want to be homeless, drug addicted, or a prostitute. As long as the only damage done affects the self.

These laws only exist in response to popular demand. An immense amount of money, time and labor goes to waste dealing with these types of crimes. It would be a lot more productive and profitable to let people have rule over what they do to our bodies. There is no reason why we need to put this much energy into people who will rid of themselves for us. It would save us money on law enforcement and greatly reduce our crime rate if we would just let them do what they want to themselves.

Not only are we told what we may and may not do to our bodies, we are not even allowed to have all of the information about the products we consume. Many of the foods we purchase are the products of bio-genetics and the FDA does not require these companies to put that information on the label. Another example of restricted information involves animal testing. All we know is what these companies release to the press. Since our tax dollars are funding the projects we should be informed if they are making any progress, or just mutilating animals. It seems to be a characteristic among these companies to keep as much information confidential as they can. This makes me wonder what they are doing that they do not want the public to know about. A new trend among prescription companies is television commercials now that it is legal. Several of these drugs have not been around long enough to know what the long-term effects are, and they do not feel the need to tell the public about this. Furthermore, even the Christian Children's Fund, a charitable organization, omits important details from their commercials. They do not tell you that the money you send is only available to people who convert to Christianity. Many of these people are very religious and would rather starve than alter their traditions. It is disheartening to know how much of our money goes to these misrepresenting companies. Similarly are children are being cheated out of a full education because schools boards have decided to exclude certain parts of our history from required texts. If we are to expect are children to be able to discriminate truths from falsehoods they need to know the whole story. Complete and correct information is a freedom and a right. We should not have to rely on misrepresentations.

A limitation on our freedom, which technically should not be, is the lack of freedom of speech and the right to assemble. People protest all kinds of injustices and instead of making a change in the world, the police mace them, shoot them with rubber bullets, beat them and take them to jail. Most of the charges that protesters are arrested for have nothing to do with politics. Police arrest protesters for minor violations t up are often dropped when they go to court, just to get them off the streets. When they try to use their freedom of speech to inform the public of the violation of their rights, the FCC enforce censorship and the public never sees the tape.

It seems to me that the issues that are most important for the public to be apart of are the issues that we are not allowed to express our opinions on. We vote on measures and pass them and as soon as someone tries to put it in to effect, someone vetoes it. A prime example is doctor-assisted suicide, we voted it in and they threw it out. We do not even have any say when the president decides to bomb other countries. I think that we should have say on it since we, the citizens, are the ones who get to die at war. The government does not care about the citizen's views because we do not get to choose not to fight. It makes no sense to me why we have to wait until we are eighteen to vote and fight for our country, but we cannot decide if it is necessary to fight. The whole point of voting was to stop the politicians from imposing their values on us.

Everyone who works pays taxes, most of the time the money seems to go to more corrupt causes than respectable. An argument in favor of taxes would be that it is suppose to go to our local police and they are here to "protect and serve". I have concluded that the more of our money works against us than for us. I have not seen anything that would give me trust in our police lately. What I do see is everything from police brutality, false arrests, and falsifying evidence. Policing programs have even found it suitable to entrapment people, they send minors in to bars and pretend to be drug dealers to arrest addicts. I do not see how they try to justify doing this because of both acts are illegal. In addition, there is the issue of corruption. Such as the police in Texas turning their heads to hate crimes or not prosecuting the offender sufficiently. One specific example that comes to mind is a punk rocker (Brian Denahey) in Texas who was ran over by a jock. The jock fled the scene, the police did not find him for days, and his sentence