Genghis Khan wrote:Really? Which government bureaucrat is telling you can't buy an iPhone?
Well, Inland Revenue Service (or the IRS in the US) collects a large fraction of my income before I even see it. I have zero control over how that part of my income is spent.
Further, there are any number of products I may wish to buy, but which a range of government bureaucrats at all levels decided to prohibit. From drugs to pepper-spray (in the UK).
Genghis Khan wrote:Which government bureaucrat is telling you you can't get a hot dog, or soda, or Marlboro?
If I lived in New York, the mayor would tell me not to buy a soda which is too large for his (the mayor's) taste.
Anywhere in the US, FDA bureaucrats prohibit me from buying raw mik.
And Marijuana smoking is illegal virtually everywhere.
Which government bureaucrat is telling you you can't accept a job offer at Bank of America, or what candidate for office secretary you're allowed to employ?
The Equal Opportunity bureaucracy will start questioning my hiring standards if my workforce's distribution of gender/race is not to their liking. Further, I am not allowed to work in the US (no work visa), nor am I allowed to provide employment to my own daughter (again, no work visa, this time in the UK).
Depending on what I want to employ people to do (or be employed to do myself), any number of professional licensing rules may prohibit me. And, of course, I cannot employ anybody without filling mountains of paperwork, and otherwise waste time as the government's arrend boy filling forms and collecting taxes on its behalf.
More generally, freedom is the freedom to do what you want, not just what government bureaucrats choose to allow you.
You're confusing charity with a social safety net. These two aren't the same and do not correspond to the same guidelines and objectives.
Both have the same objectives, namely helping the poor by resources taken from the wealthy. They are obviously operated differently, just as consensual sex and rape have the same objective (at least to one of the parties) while employing very different means.
Decky wrote:People like being alive, the NHS keeps them that way, the libertarians would take it and laugh as the poor dies in the streets, why wouldn't literally any other ideology be more appealing to people that libertarianism the ideology of death?
People like being alive, but not at all costs. The NHS doesn't keep people alive - there is no reason at all to expect that more people would have died without it. Anything else is a mere ideologically-tainted speculation.
Free men are not equal and equal men are not free.
Government is not the solution. Government is the problem.