[threethirtytwo]

I guess the keyword is "individual freedom." Technically, freedom can be expanded in the way you're implying but usually in common parlance they are referring to individual freedoms. That is what people mean when they say the US is "more free" than China. Under your expanded definition it's not clear which one is more free.

Extreme individual freedom is often called anarchy.

[AnthonyMouse]

There is nearly universal agreement among humans that nobody should have the "freedom" to commit non-consensual violence against another person. This is often cast as interfering with their freedom to be left alone and then the argument is that you don't have the freedom to deprive someone else of their freedom. But as soon as you have a government that so much as prohibits murder you're not doing something that can be described as anarchy.

The question is, in a "free country", does the government limit itself to punishing compelling violations with near-universal consensus like murder, or does it seize control over the micromanagement of dubious and petty violations like hypothetically marginally increasing traffic by carrying out a construction project?

It seems like the thing you're objecting to is the latter.

[threethirtytwo]

I think this framing quietly smuggles in a category error.

This isn’t about what feels compelling to you or me, nor is it a clean split between “near-universal moral prohibitions” and “petty micromanagement.” There’s a massive middle ground you’re flattening. Scale matters. Irreversibility matters. Civilization-level consequences matter.

Banning murder preserves a baseline condition for freedom. Large infrastructure projects don’t just “nudge” behavior or marginally increase traffic. They reshape cities, labor markets, land values, energy use, migration patterns, and political power for decades or centuries. They bind future generations who never consented and cannot meaningfully opt out. Calling that “petty” is just wrong descriptively, regardless of whether you support the project.

Once you acknowledge that, the question stops being “should the state only prevent violence?” and becomes “what kinds of collective decisions are legitimate when their effects are vast, asymmetric, and effectively permanent?” That’s not micromanagement. That’s the core problem of modern governance.

So no, the objection isn’t to the government punishing murder instead of being anarchic. It’s to pretending that civilization-shaping actions belong in the same moral bucket as minor regulatory nuisances. You can argue that such projects are worth the tradeoff. You can argue they should override individual objections. But dismissing them as trivial violations is an easy rhetorical move that avoids grappling with why people resist them in the first place.