Wait, so does that mean the "War on Drugs" wasn't making me more free??? The US Government would never do anything fascist so obviously you're wrong.
The point is though, all laws make someone "less free", because the purpose of law is to prohibit.
I think you're wrong. Not all laws prohibit. For example, take a law that establishes public libraries. It doesn't prohibit anybody from anything.
The market would take care of it. Instead of police, just hire security.
Every law, every program has a cost. Many times this costs are worth it. And there are plenty of times where they aren't, or have unintended side-effects.
Pointing out these costs and forcing society to recognize them as explicit decisions and tradeoffs is one of the key benefits of the Right, even if you disagree on where they fall on the balance of net-benefits in the final analysis.
TANSTAAFL
I don't think either side is better or worse at this. It's more like, point out the costs of the other side's policies while glossing over the costs of your own.
Abortion is a great example. I never hear a pro-life argument that starts out "abortion should be illegal but it will create all these unwanted babies and here's what I propose we do about that and what it will cost. We'll vote on outlawing abortion but it will be tied to tax increases to pay for programs to ensure these children have proper nutrition and education."
The idea that the right cares about babies right up until the moment you're born is common enough that George Carlin was joking about it in the 70s.
They are against schools, against libraries, against whatever, as taxes reduce their return on assets.
It’s all shorted and eventually backfires.
Whose producer is only happy to collude with the regulatory agencies to get those trans fats declared as safe.
The "revolving door phenomenon" is a worldwide problem. Big business captures the government much of the time.
These days, they might even get their opponents' opinions classified as misinformation.
If it could just exist without restricting someone‘s freedom in the wider sense, we wouldn‘t need a law.
It's even worse for authors. They pay taxes to support institutions that exist to lend out the author's books for free.
Publishing wouldn’t exist without libraries. Something like 90% of book retail space has vaporized, and the ruthless consolidation makes the top 50 authors utterly dominate sales.
Not sure if this was meant to be a troll, but obviously private libraries depend on someone enforcing private ownership in general. Public libraries have some very specific legal carveouts (e.g. around protecting patron privacy) but otherwise are treated the same as private libraries, only publicly funded.
If there was a law that said everyone must only wear blue clothes on Wednesdays, that's taken away your freedom to choose what to wear. If there's an exception to that law that says socks can be either green or blue, that's not the law granting a new freedom to wear green socks, it's a law not taking away a freedom that existed before the blue clothing law.
Freedom is a slippery concept.
I offer the 13th amendment (US) as a counterexample.