Defend your right to own a car.

[bu villain]

You shouldnt have the freedom to support yourself off of my work....... that is where we went wrong. "as soon as people realize they can vote themselves money, that will be the end of the republic"..... how twisted have we become that you are literally saying to me that me wanting to keep the money i work for is denying someone else their freedom. It's a real tragedy that you or anyone else actually thinks this way. "government allows us...." That's not the way it was meant to be. For too long people have been willing to trade their freedom away to big government in exchange for entitlements... now the monster may be too big to ever be put back in it's cage.

You are misinterpreting me. Take for example, your right to bear arms. It is an important freedom but it can also be used to deny others freedom. You can deny someone their right to live with it. You could also enslave someone with it and force them to support you with their work (the exact same thing you are complaining about). You can say how you think things should be but at the end of the day we have to deal with reality. Reality is that if enough people want to force you to follow their rules, you will never achieve that life you are hoping for.

What a great nation we live in..... where the majority can vote away the rights of the minority, no matter how stupid the majority is.

If you have a better system please let me know.

So when the government uses it's agencies to attack political parties that support my views, that is my government representing me? When the government pushes unconstitutional laws, that is my government representing me? Are all of my rights borrowed from the government to be taken away whenever they see fit?

The government is not one thing that represents one view. It is a conglomeration of many different views. If you don't feel your opinion is represented it's probably just because it is getting drown out by the other 300,000,000+ views. Your rights are not borrowed from the government but your rights don't always enforce themselves either.

"Government allows us to determine collectively which freedoms we want to restrict because one person's freedom can result in the denial of another's" - My disagreement here is with the term "allow". Allow assumes that the government has ownership of one's freedom of choice. That's not correct. Our government should be a management company, not a ruling entity that allows you to take actions. Our founding fathers never intended that the government would allow you to do anything, rather, they setup a government that would be a servant entity to the people. You may not have intended your statement that way, but that is something to consider in the choice of the word.

The word allow is confusing things here. A grill "allows" you to grill a steak. It doesn't give you permission. When I say the government allows us to determine our freedoms, I mean government is only a tool through which citizens can collectively decide and enforce those freedoms. It's still the citizens deciding, not the government as some separate entity. Also, freedoms may not last long if you don't have any way to enforce them. Of course governments are just as capable at taking away freedoms as it is protecting them. There is no solution to that problem that I know of. Checks and balances are the best we have.

"Freedom is not a gift bestowed upon us by other men, but a right that belongs to us by the laws of God and nature." - "On Government No. I", John Webbe, published in Benjamin Franklin's paper, The Pennsylvania Gazette, April 1, 1736

Very true, but God and nature do not enforce those freedoms.

"We have freedom of religion because we collectively agree that it is a good thing" - I have to disagree. We have freedom of religion because it is a Constitutionally-protected freedom. Our fore-fathers recognized this as one of the most important reasons that the first Pilgrims came to America, and determined to make this a founding principal of this country from the beginning. "We the people" did not vote on this, or collectively agree - the founding fathers decided to collectively agree that this was an important founding principal that must be protected.

The constitution was and still is that agreement. The founding fathers were not dictators, they provided us a method to change the constitution. If enough citizens disagreed with the first amendment, it could be repealed through our constitutional process. The fact no one is trying to do that is reflective of our ongoing agreement.

A democracy is not the same as a republic. A democracy is the rule of the majority over the individual. and the majority's power is absolute and not limited. A Republic protects the minority and individuals by establishing rights that are not designed to simply be overwritten by the collective will of the majority. That does not mean that it cannot be changed, but that amendments go through the proper checks and balances first, and pass Constitutional muster.

I think some people are too caught up on the difference between a democracy and republic. The central issue in this discussion which you mention is that there is a process for the constitution to be changed. Thus there is no rule that isn't subjected to the citizens will. True, our republic requires more than 51% to change it but the core principle of collective agreement remains.