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You have a funny definition of freedom. You seem to be defining it as freedom from something existing anywhere in the world. Or perhaps just an hours drive from you. To me, I see a clear and bright line between wanting to free from compulsory exposure to something odious, and wanting to be free from incidental or hypothetical exposure.
I don't have a teenager... yet. But vetting the households of her friends is already a key part of our lives. Maybe we're being controlling. Maybe we have an unhealthy fear of how bifurcated America has become. Maybe it's a perfectly healthy fear. Only time will tell.
Or freedom as the tendency for things to go to their proper place and stay there. Look, I don't actually care if teenagers drink. I think potential co-ed sleeping arrangements at that party are a bigger concern and drinking brings a profound meh. But you have to have a default about it, and taking for granted that they shouldn't, then hosting teen drinking parties should be fraught. Why? Because society has to have defaults about all sorts of behavior, and opting out of defaults carries friction. "He is sovereign who sets the null hypothesis" and all that. You can move to a nudist colony to opt out of the societal default of pants(or a sarong, whatever). I will not stop you. But it is quite a bit of friction towards living a pantsfree life. And there's thousands of defaults on issues more controversial among non-weirdos. Like drug use, which is what we're talking about.
I happen to think that defaults should be virtuous and prosocial. I don't particularly view teen drinking as bad, but imposing friction on doing bad things is, to me, definitionally freer than imposing friction on doing good things, because you can't do neither. We live in a society and societies have norms.
Now it looks like moms for liberty's sworn enemy is doing its damnedest to establish a societal norm of "everyone is a gay gendergoblin", and it is in no way hypocritical to oppose that societal norm(which is in fact highly stupid and probably destructive), while also undermining the social norm of "teenagers don't get to use alcohol". I agree with that set of values. But it is also in no way contrary to freedom to punish defectors.
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Not really, isn't this the core debate over anarchotyrrany? It's fairly uncontroversial that enforced law and order increases freedom for law abiding citizens, the question is where we set the laws and how intense the enforcement should be, what acceptable levels of law-breaking and over-enforcement are. I, and certainly my wife, have more freedom in NYC in a world where the NYPD enforces the laws than I have in a world where they don't.
You might disagree that underage drinking is bad, I might disagree with it. But there is no indication whatsoever that a democratic majority of voting Americans disagree with it. The most recent polling I could find indicated that just 10% of Americans favor a drinking age of 18, let alone lower than 18. Back in 2014, 77% of Americans opposed lowering the drinking age to 18 while 60% favored more strict penalties for underage drinking.
Allowing parents to serve alcohol to minors, to other parents' children, restricts the freedom of other parents to allow their teenagers to move about the world as freely as possible and with as little supervision as possible. It narrows the universe of places that parents can be confident their kids will be safe from something that the vast majority of parents think is dangerous.
I've heard enough from libertarians about "positive freedoms" to refuse that. They have the freedom to choose from the options they're given with regards to how much they let their kid be unsupervised. What others are allowed to do is not within the realm of "freedom".
I would assume that @FiveHourMarathon would think that they have more viable options than they did before, if suldenly everyone decided to prevent underage drinking. That proliferation of choice seems like freedom.
And, of course, the subjective experience would feel freeing.
Thanks, you get it.
Perfect example: Ocean City, NJ
It's a dry town. That's less freedom, you can't buy alcohol on the island.
But the experience of traveling there, especially as a family, isn't necessarily that you have less freedom, it's that you have more. At 10-14, my parents could just send me and my sister to wander around the island. There was less trouble to get into, so my parents didn't have to watch me all the time, they could just send me off on my own.
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That's like saying that allowing people to publish blasphemy restricts the freedom of everyone else to be in a world free of blasphemy.
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