You draw the line where it is obvious that the benefit far outweighs the risk.

Determined by who? Benefits and risks for who?

The people who elect the officials.

In different words, you are advocating mob rule: if the majority wants it, that makes it right and justifies it according to your world view.

But there are legitimate medical and/or non-medical reasons to object to other vaccines (e.g., HPV, TB). [References?]

TB vaccinations make it impossible to determine active TB infection via a skin test; that's why the US currently doesn't vaccinate against TB, while it is mandatory elsewhere. HPV vaccination is morally objectionable to many people because they object to the presumption that their kids will be unable to control their sexual urges.

Citation required.

Jacobson v. Massachusetts

Taxes are paid for a lot of things that are not used by individual tax payers. Case in point, people without children pay taxes for public schools even though they never send children there. People who own cars still pay for public transit even though they never use it.

Indeed. And not only are those policies morally wrong, they don't even accomplish what they are intended to accomplish. Both public schools and public transit are ineffective and inefficient given the vast amounts of money we sink into them, and both are the result of massive lobbying by special interest groups.

It is all about choice.

Evidently, what you're advocating is all about promoting cronyism and corruption and taking away the rights and choices of people whose views differ from the majority.

What about the right to not being infected by your precious little snowflake who attends the same school ?

That conflict of supposed "rights" only arises because you and I are forced to pay for the same school and forced to have our kids attend the same school, i.e., it's the result of the way out school system is set up. If parents had a choice of where to send their kids and schools were free to set their own policies, this would sort itself out without all this shouting and chest beating.

Personally, I would choose schools that have strict MMR vaccination requirements. I would also choose schools that don't teach the progressive nonsense you obviously believe in.

Yeah. It's worked out really well for selling (actually leasing) the Indiana Toll Road. The current owners of the lease filed for bankruptcy last year after operating the road for 8 years.

That's like saying "we slashed and burned the forest, paved it over in concrete, but now we're just giving it back to nature; why is nothing growing?" After a century of running roads as publicly financed infrastructure, successful privatization is really hard; it's pretty much impossible if you privatize individual roads surrounded by publicly funded roads.

Privatization rules, since Indiana made $3.8b off of the deal. Except when the private company can't operate what they paid for and live up to their end of the bargain.

Most "privatizations" in the US are simple crony capitalism, a way of giving away large amounts of money and property to politically connected donors. The company did get what they paid for: a large handout in response to paying lobbyists. That has nothing to do with creating a private market in roads.

Are you seriously trying to equate being poked in the arm with a small needle a few time with giving up a kidney? They are many orders of magnitude different. Calling it a medical procedure sound ominous but it is a very minor medical procedure.

So where do you draw the line? Who determines whether a medical procedure is sufficiently benign so that the government can force you to undergo it? Remember, these are the same institutions that couldn't even get basic nutritional information right and keep approving drugs that turn out to be unsafe.

Personally, I believe that MMR and DTP are safe and unobjectionable. But there are legitimate medical and/or non-medical reasons to object to other vaccines (e.g., HPV, TB).

Vaccines are not required but they are required to attend school.

That is not strictly speaking true. The US government can force anybody to get vaccinated, although currently, that is only being used (in most cases) in schools.

In any case, there is nothing wrong with schools requiring kids to be vaccinated. The part that is wrong is that parents are required to pay for public schools regardless even if they disagree with public school policies, whether it is vaccinations or the curriculum. The issue of imposing vaccination requirements and making religious exemptions happens just because government is imposing public schools and taxes paying for public schools. That's the real issue, not whether vaccinations are good or bad.

I would honestly like to know how that worked out.

Quite well: private toll roads have been around since antiquity, and the US and England had many "turnpikes" (something you can still find in the names of "government" roads). With modern tech, private toll roads would work even better than they have in the past.

The first involves you owning the land, the second involves you being a part of a micro-government.

Home owner's associations are very much like "micro-governments", with a bunch of important differences: they are small and local (even smaller than county or city governments), only people who choose to be members pay into them, they are fairly free in what rules they can set, and only members actually set the rules. Those differences ensure that HOAs are much more resistant to the kind of cronyism, corruption, and favoritism you find in any level of government. (They also have balanced budgets and monetary reserves because members understand that any liabilities count directly against their equity.)

Yes, instead the corps would be funding the 'studies' with the results already being predetermined and proprietary methods obscured and passed off as science.

That's what's already happening now. Not only that, we are giving corporations tax dollars and subsidies to support these deceptions, and pass laws based on the bogus science.

The government suffers from political motivations, but oversight is the voters' responsibility. If they don't do it, nobody will.

There is a much simpler solution: let people make their own decisions; don't take their money in order to support a corporate cleptocracy.

The problem isn't science. The problem is science reporting.

In the case of nutrition, diet, and exercise, the primary problem isn't science reporting, it is government programs based on questionable science, from bad nutritional recommendations and bad labeling requirements to idiotic agricultural subsidies, public school curricula and lunch programs, and more.

Because what is the alternative? Alchemy? Voodoo? Religion?

The problem isn't with science per se, it is with linking government and science too closely. Without government funding for these studies, lobbying by big corporations, and various government agencies implementing flawed public policies and educational programs, these bad nutritional studies would never have mattered much.

Fine. All unvaccinated children can go to a special school together where all the parents share the same beliefs.

That's the libertarian position: you decide which schools your kids go to and pay for it, and the schools decide who they take and what requirements they have, including strict vaccination requirements.

Unfortunately, it's not what progressives and "liberals" want. After deciding that everybody must go to public schools and deciding how to assign people to schools in order to maximize diversity and accomplish other goals, you then get into discussions about what the curriculum must be, and whether kids have to be vaccinated or not. And since everybody is forced to pay for the public schools, this leads to irreconcilable conflicts.

The absurdity of this argument is that even if it were true, is having a mentally ill child worse than death?

That's a decision for parents to make, not for you or for the CDC.

He said that he has heard of cases. And if you look at the list of side effects on the CDC page, you find that he's right.

http://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/va...

Several other severe problems have been reported after a child gets MMR vaccine, including:
Deafness
Long-term seizures, coma, or lowered consciousness
Permanent brain damage

The argument for vaccines is that the benefits outweigh the risks. That's a good argument for taking them. It's questionable that it's a good argument for forcing people to take them.

actually, the small-l libertarian view is more nuanced. refusal to vaccinate your kids can easily be seen as an act of negligent violence against others (me).

Libertarianism (or classical liberalism) doesn't recognize "negligent violence". You're simply playing word games in an attempt to justify positive rights.

do libertarians believe that you shouldn't be forced to correct your eyesight before being granted a license to drive?

I think whether I drive on a road and what the conditions are under which I do so should be a voluntary agreement between the road owner and myself. Right now, it is not, since I am forced to pay for the roads and then forced to comply with often arbitrary and corrupt rules for using them. You may think that that's the only way of having roads, but it clearly isn't if you look at history.

stay in Galt's gulch if you want, but if you have the measles, keep the fuck away from me and my kids

I think that's a perfectly fine attitude to have, and in fact I am vaccinated. But you may be forced for your kids to associate with unvaccinated kids because you are forced to pay for public school, your school choices are limited both by money and by location, and public schools have to cater to religious objections. So now you are fighting with religious nuts over which vaccinations should be mandatory. If schools were privatized, private schools would have no problem imposing vaccine requirements, and you could send your kids to schools that require measles vaccines. Religious nuts could send their kids to schools for religious nuts and get wiped out by a measles epidemic.

The problems you are having aren't with libertarianism, they are with lack of libertarianism.

Men are claiming to be victims, feminists are. Why don't you work on getting them out of their "bubble of [imagined] victimhood"?

As long as the girls have equal opportunity to get in and aren't steered away for sexist reasons then or earlier in life, yes.

Of course, in the usual circular logic of liberals and progressives, if the outcome isn't equal, that is clear evidence for "sexist reasons". It just couldn't be that women make different choices from men for perfectly legitimate reasons.

The whole point of herd immunity is to protect those who, for health reasons, cannot receive a vaccination.

Herd immunity is simply a concept about whether a disease is likely to spread through an entire population or die out after infecting only part of a population. It's relevant if you look at animal herds and want to minimize the overall loss of life.

Human beings aren't cattle. Even if the assumptions of herd immunity apply to human populations (a big if), the measures to implement it don't. For example, in order to achieve herd immunity, you might well decide to slaughter animals that don't respond to the vaccine. Or you might preemptively restrict the movement of animals in a herd.

Treating humans as members of a "herd" or collective is wrong; human beings are individuals with individual rights, and those rights include not having the government inject substances into you that it deems beneficial for the rest of society. It doesn't matter how good the evidence is in any particular case. Vaccinations should be voluntary, period.