So I am free to walk through your home any time I feel like it? So I am free to take your food if I am hungry? I thought even libertarians concede that your freedom ends when it encroaches on the freedom of another. That requires that even a libertarian society must have certain collective limitations of individual freedom. By your reasoning that means a libertarian regime will eventually become totalitarian.

- Danny Low, dlow@ppg01.sc.hp.com, September 19, 1997

Freedom does not mean licence. By definition, freedom includes accepting responsibility for one's actions. So, while you might be 'free' to walk through anyone's home if you were willing to be arrested for break and enter, you never have a 'right' to someone else's property no matter what your circumstance.

Any system of government that provides for freedom must also be a government that protects people and their possessions (the result of their work). That's why, even in a free society, you will get into trouble for punching someone in the nose, breaking into their home, etc.

This limited (protective) role can hardly be described as totalitarianism. Rather, it provides the framework needed to protect the rights of citizens, those rights being life, liberty and property. Why liberty and property? Liberty gives us the freedom of peaceable action required for a free society to function. (Note: (again) being held responsible for one's own actions is always a part of freedom.) Property is the result of your actions.

Under such a framework, power resides with the individual. How can that be called totalitarianism? [lkw]