[jessaustin]

I'm at least as confused by your comment as you were by mine. b^) On a spectrum of permissiveness, I would have thought we could safely place USA between DPRK and Sweden? I'm happy to consider arguments against such an arrangement... Of course, the idea of a spectrum is also a bit flawed, since there's more than one axis to this.

But we were talking about coercion and authority: GP seemed unable to imagine taking decisions without them. I wanted to point out that most of us are already doing that, to some extent. I hope that in the rest of my life I'll see some progress: more decisions based on personal preferences rather than authority and coercion. To that end, I'm an anarchist. That is, I oppose arbitrary authority.