> I'm so sick of people using freedom of choice to excuse doing stupid things. Freedom of choice doesn't mean "do whatever you want any time you want."

Liberty, by the classical definition, is the ability to choose to do anything except infringe on another's life, liberty, or property. Thus, no murder, slavery, or theft, respectively. Conservatives generally would add "and one's own life, liberty, or property," on the end of that definition, resulting in such things as drug enforcement laws, mandatory education, and the virtue of moderation, respectively.

Much of the debate has to do with the nature of goodness. Many Christians, especially, while they recognize that many things beyond the classic definition are also wrong, they simultaneously recognize that it is impossible to force people to be good. Trying produces mostly bitter resentment, which will inevitably hurt the Church. They find it much better to let God change our insides and let the state protect our outsides.

>There have to be set standards and rules or there would be chaos.

Liberty and license are fundamentally different. Most importantly, liberty is inseparable from responsibility. Chaos only results from eliminating the consequences, good or bad, of actions.

>This measuring system thing is exactly the same as having a national language. Say you sold ice cream, and by law all ice cream containers were to have nutritional information on them. It would hardly be right for the government to allow these nutritional facts to be written in Chinese, because a very small part of the population knows Chinese, and the point of the nutritional information is to inform the public.

Alternatively, the buyer could exercise just a little bit of intelligence and purchase the product with English nutrional information. The kind of person who reads nutrition labels has already proven themselves to be more than competent enough to make the former decision. People who don't read nutrion labels don't care anyway. The freedom to choose which product to buy will then have a very strong impact on the seller, as they provide only what people are willing to buy.

> You can make up all the crazy measuring systems you want, but you can't use them expecting anyone else to understand what you're talking about. By moving to make the metric system a national measuring system, the governments are just trying to make things more universal.

If a business invents a measuring system, they shoot themselves in the foot. If a business lies about using current measuring systems, that is a violation of civil law and they are open to damage suits. Regulation in this area, as in so many others, is futile.

Take for example the British grocers that continue to use Imperial as well as metric. They do so because their customers want them to. If the customers wanted the food only in metric, then the grocers would use that. Companies that don't adapt to the needs of their customers die out. Consumers have far more clout than corporations, because the demanders can always replace the supplier, but the supplier can never replace the demanders. U.S. customary continues to be used worldwide in various industries which ship to the U.S., not because of that country's powerful economy or political influence, but because of the nearly three-hundred-million people who want to buy products that use customary measures.

In a more general case, people probably do have the right to be stupid. At least, there is no possible way to prevent them from being so. A person can only make good decisions if there is a possibility of making bad decisions. Experience is a better teacher than we.

Liberty is advocated by two groups: those who know it to be just and those who know it to be most politically effective. From either perspective, it is a deceptively subtle, complex, and powerful thing.

gab"Excuse the typos"by