[Aurornis]

> In most of "land of the free", I can't even sit on a park bench and drink a can of beer.

Freedom doesn’t mean you get to do whatever you want with property that isn’t yours.

You can sit on your own bench on your own property and drink a beer.

The people of the city can decide that they don’t want people using the taxpayer funded public benches used for that.

Other cities do allow it.

But freedom doesn’t mean anyone gets to do anything they like anywhere they want. We have another word for that: anarchy. It’s a different thing and you don’t actually want it, because there are a lot of people who would do much worse things to you than drink beer on your bench if they were free to do whatever they wanted wherever they wanted to do it.

[ks2048]

I agree one man's "freedom" is another man's annoyance (or worse). It is a difficult, fine-line to draw.

Thus, the beer example was mocking the author's view of "you have freedom or you don't" and the simplistic idea that "America is a _free country_".

[soerxpso]

Complete freedom actually would mean that you can do whatever you want anywhere. You're really just arguing that complete freedom is bad (and that's a very agreeable point), but there's no need to skew definitions just because the culture says "freedom generally = good"

[thunderfork]

I have complex feelings about this subject, but if you can't stop yourself from leaning on "absolute freedom is the only correct option", you're going to have to make sure you're not making the mistake of thinking "absolute freedom" is "some specific balance of freedoms and constraints"

[slopinthebag]

The issue is state ownership of property more than anything else. If it was truly a public space, drinking a beer wouldn’t be a problem at all.

[Aurornis]

That’s not what public space means by any modern definition of the word.

This is still trying to equate public with anarchy, but they’re very different concepts.

[slopinthebag]

Just because people conflate “public” with “state-owned” doesn’t mean it’s somehow not state owned.

Call it “unowned” property if you want. It doesn’t matter.

Anarchy doesn’t mean chaos either, it means without rulers. You’re conflating those terms as well.