No, it's a question of degrees. If you think people are stupid now, do away with education and see how bad it gets. I guarantee you that eventually the population will make Honey Boo Boo look like a PhD.

Or they can go and get their fucking flu shot like everyone else.

Exactly. Give someone the choice of doing something that is for the good of all but requires some effort, or selfishly refusing to do anything at all, and that person will pick the selfish choice 9 times out of 10. People are fucking lazy, and frequently don't do the right thing until they're forced to.

We get it, you hate taxes.

Um, no. People of your bent are so quick to sprint towards the extreme and the hyperbolic. You should become familiar with the concept of "grey". Not everything is black and white.

If we lived in a society that was mature enough to not require the use of force to protect the group from the individual, then hey, enjoy your Randian pariadise. We don't. Restrict the power of the state beyond a certain point and watch the world burn.

There is a difference between having a government respectful of individual rights, and one that justifies enforcing every aspect of everyone's life because they by claiming every activity affects all the taxpayers.

And of course, there is nothing in between. All or nothing.

You can have things like taxes that pay for education, without telling everyone their children will be wards of the state every day for eight hours or you go to jail

Sure, let's let people not send their kids to school. Do you want a stupid population that's easily controlled? Because that's how you get a stupid population that's easily controlled. Do away with mandatory education and people will get stupider than they already are. You really want that?

The problem with giving all rights to the individual and none to the state is that people make stupid decisions that make things worse for everyone else.

I also noticed how you didn't answer my question about solving conflicts and enforcing contracts. Yeah, don't have an answer for that one, do you?

Individual rights must be limited. The power of one person to destroy things that others rely on to live must be curbed. You can have a society that respects individual rights but still serves the group. I'm not ready to sacrifice civilization on your altar.

How about we give no one authority over anyone except themselves, and everyone authority over their own body and life.

That's different from anarchy how, exactly? Who resolves conflicts between two people? Who enforces contracts? Who sanctions destructive behavior?

Oh, right, magically everyone will act with total respect for everyone else's well-being. Nobody will act selfishly to the detriment of others at all. I had forgotten that Ayn Rand was God.

Why do statist always think that when someone objects to elevating the rights of the state to impose its will on people, they always assume that the person objecting must be some crazy anarchist or something?

Statistics and previous experience.

The many impose their will on the few. That's the difference between a productive society and anarchy.

Individual rights always result in better outcomes than collectivist rights. You seem to think the latter is preferred, even when I pointed out where using such a principle can lead.

Depends on how you define "better". We could give one person absolute authority over all (which is the ultimate expression of individual rights) and that person would probably say it's a pretty damn good outcome. Everyone else would probably think it sucks.

I think the United Nations' "Universal Declaration of Human Rights" has some excellent stuff in it - except near the bottom the invalidating disclaimer: "(3) These rights and freedoms may in no case be exercised contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations."

No argument there, I wasn't aware of that.

... That's not even remotely what I said.

No. Individuals need to be protected from those who would do them harm. We're not talking about ideas here, we're talking about people's lives.

And we remove people from the group all the time. See: prisons, etc.

I think you are smart enough to see where this leads. "Society" needs to be protected - from dangerous ideas spread by some individual. So "society" implements a change to the "contract" (that nobody signed) and now "dangerous" speech is a death sentence.

Well, that escalated quickly.

Why don't you take your 'sovereign citizens", "objectivist", "Atlas Shrugged is the word of God", "OMG RULES!" ass and get a job, or something.

We're all equally non-important, then.

Which is why the flu vaccine is updated each year, to counteract the virii that have developed immunity to the previous year's vaccine. This is not the same situation as it is with antibiotics. We can't update antibiotics each year for the new batch of bacteria out there which have developed resistance to currently available drugs.

The flu vaccine saves lives, period. Maybe it's not 100% effective, but it's still better than nothing.

Give me a fucking break. Remember that there are other people in the world besides you, and they are just as important as you are. Society as a concept may not have rights, but the individuals do; one of the rights that is given to individuals by society is protection from the malicious and incompetent.

Your right to swing your fist (or associate with people you know you may kill through exposure to the disease you currently have) ends at the tip of my nose. Society has decided that this is an appropriate compromise between your rights and the rights of others. There's only so much of an asshole you can be before you get sanctioned by the will of the people.

If the IT consulting company can deliver the results for less money

Which they can't. Have you ever SEEN some of the pureed shit that masquerades as code from (some) overseas developers? More often than not domestic coders have to be called in to un-fuck their shit, resulting in additional expenses that wipe out any savings realized from outsourcing the initial development.

"You get what you pay for" doesn't really work when the ignorant suits who make the decisions don't understand what they're getting. All they know is that they gave the developers a vague set of specs and instead of domestic workers demanding more complete descriptions, the overseas workers keep their mouths shut and do whatever they think is what the customer wants. When the overseas devs send back their crap, all the suits know is that it cost less RIGHT NOW to get that work done. Never mind that they've doubled (or more) their future maintenance costs, it's all about quarterly results.

Does it tell you how much of that "entitlement" spending goes to retirees and disabled veterans? Does it tell you how it's not an "entitlement" but something that the people who receive the entitlement have paid for in either cash or blood?

If you want to fix the budget problem, cut military spending. We spend more on "defense" than the next 5 countries on the list combined.