By this logic, you can have no principled objection to the policies enacted in Germany in the late 1930's, since that government was democratically elected.

By contrast, the founders of the U.S. designed a constitutional republic, where "a bunch of people" could not get together and agree to confiscate the lives, liberty and property of some other people. The constitution does this by restricting the government to having certain enumerated powers, thereby also limiting the power of those that elect government officials.

As they say, "The U.S. Constitution is not perfect, but it's a hell of a lot better than what we have now".

As for your laundry list, one of these things is not like the other: police, roads, schools. I'll give you a hint: it's the one that is needed to actually protect peoples' individual rights. If we can whittle down the role of government to just such rights-protecting functions, then we can start discussing some non-coercive ways to fund it.

That's an understatement. The point of calling things which must be provided by others a "right", is to obliterate the concept of rights altogether. A non-contradictory definition of "rights" must be one which imposes only negative obligation on other human beings.

I really like the rest of your comment, too.

That _was_ funny ... and also true!

My mother is a retired school psychologist, so I got to be the guinea pig for all of the tests she was learning to administer. By the time she got around to learning Rorschach, I was in high school, so I tormented her by sneaking a peek at the scoring rubric before she gave me the test. The basic approach to being declared unstable was to simply obsess on any given concept - it didn't need to be anything particularly grisly or perverted. Butterflies would do just fine. I took my Mom three images to catch on to what I was doing, and we both had a good chuckle.

What a crock!