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Freedom isn't about doing what's best for the collective. That's communism. If liberty isn't the lynchpin that the American experiment was built on, I don't know what is.

"Freedom" isn't the ability to do anything you want when you want with whomever you want. That's license. Societies built on license don't last very long. Societies built on political freedom and moral virtue (see the Founding Fathers, Alexis de Tocqueville, etc.) not only persist, but succeed in spreading happiness and opportunity to the greatest portion of its people.

By your definition of freedom, we lived under tyranny for the first 180 years of this nation's existence. Funny, but that's exactly the kind of opinion I got from my dope-smoking 60's retread professor in Western-Civ class in college....

Perhaps you should actually go back and reread 413 and 421, before you spew more nonsense about doing anything you want with whomever you want, as you obviously think I was saying. I said no such thing.

License is of course a bad thing. As I'm fond of saying, the very definition of civilization is predicated on sacrificing some personal freedoms for the security of community. However, I have a hunch that you and I would disagree wildly on where those lines are drawn. I have a hunch from what I'm reading here that you're really no different than the garden variety liberal when it comes down to recruiting government to impose your views by force.

As for the bit about living under tyrany for the first 180, years, I wouldn't have chosen those words. But...I would say enthusiastically that we've improved as we went along. The first 80 or so of those years were marked by slavery, which is surely a form of tyrany. The next 60 or so were marked by the exclusion of women from political life....so please, spare me the "we were perfect from the beginning" speech. We weren't.

"Freedom" isn't the ability to do anything you want when you want with whomever you want.

No, freedom is the ability to do whatever you want so long as you do not harm the person or property of another without their consent.