Freedom is a Frame of Mind

I can't flap my wings and fly.

My freedom has been infringed!

This is, oddly enough, the way a lot of people think.  And these people will never be free.  They cannot be free, because their idea of freedom is not having choice, but being without limitation.  The freedom to eat, to them, requires food.  The freedom to run requires legs.  The freedom to breath requires air.

That's not freedom.

Freedom is not the ability to do things.  If that is all freedom is, we can never have it.

My freedom to eat apples does not depend on my having an apple.  My freedom to purchase apples does not require that somebody sell one to me.  My freedom to possess apples does not require apples exist for me to possess.

In the end, it doesn't even require that government permit any of these things.

Freedom, you see, is a frame of mind.  Government is powerless to destroy freedom except by convincing you that you have no freedom.

The drug war is proof of this.

So stretch your legs and relax.  Government isn't going to stop you.  The only freedoms it has the power to limit are the freedoms you accept that it can.  Break the rules.  It cannot hope to enforce them.  The rules in the end are just an IQ test.

Can government be capricious and cruel?  Hell yes.  Fight against that, because it is wrong.

But don't let yourself fall into the trap of thinking you aren't free.  As soon as you think that, you aren't.