I'm not sure I see the connection, but I'm open to debate it with you. I'm about as maximalist for individual freedom as you can get without being an anarchist.

I'm not sure I see the connection, but I'm open to debate it with you. I'm about as maximalist for individual freedom as you can get without being an anarchist. I don't want to live under majoritarian rule when it comes to my bodily choices or personal picadillos or my family's, or my right to bear arms. But I think it's ignorant to compare the United States in any way to China. I don't think that a freely elected, democratic society, choosing to enforce social norms at times through contested law and legal wrangling in courts is remotely the same thing as a totalitarian state issuing a dictat. And I also don't think that the primary way to distinguish our system of governance from a dictatorahip would be to legalize everything imaginable. This is not a lukewarm approach to personal liberty, any more than sympathy should be mistaken for weakness. It's an understanding that we also need a somewhat functional and coherent society, even if it comes at some personal cost, and that without that we would end up in a power vacuum that led eventually to us being slaves in a dictatorship like China.