The idea of "natural rights" is that people have rights independent of political or legal institutions that can only be enforced by the individual or by voluntary agreement. For example, one has the natural right to defend themselves from a murderer, but not the right to force a policeman to defend them. However, a policeman is obligated to protect their citizens from murder because they are contractually obligated. Another example of someone misunderstanding the idea of rights is how some believe that free healthcare is a right. While those that say this may have great intentions, and the idea of it would perhaps help many people succeed under a failed system, free healthcare is not a right because it requires taxing others in order to pay for this healthcare. It would also include forcing doctors to change what they wish to charge for their services, ultimately stealing from the doctor. While doctors and drug-makers can and will be unfair to those who actually need their services; the best way to prevent this is through letting these doctors compete for lower costs in the free market. Smoking tobacco is similar to this, as some could argue that tobacco takes the away another person's right to breathe clean air in private businesses and privately-owned land. The only difference is that people have the choice to leave these privately-owned areas and walk a small distance toward another piece of land with cleaner air. To prohibit business owners and citizens from doing what they wish on private land is much more a restriction of their natural rights than those who wish to stay away from others who smoke and have the choice to walk away.

People would be outraged if the city prevented people from doing otherwise legal activities in their own homes, so why is it any different in a business? A business is nothing more than a building someone owns, much like a home, where they decide to provide a service and/or sell a product. Where does the city have the authority to tell a business what to do when most would agree they have no authority telling them what they may do in their own home? The difference is the idea of public rights and individual rights. While bad choices from some individuals who make up the public can ultimately harm others, they will not harm the entirety of the public if the non-consenting portions of the public have the option to step away from those that are harmful. Unless everyone in America smokes tobacco, a demand remains for non-smoking businesses to exist.

It puzzles me how more people don't accept the non-aggression principle and volunteerism when regarding the way the government works. To me, the government seems like a great big monopoly over certain businesses; only they have guns and can't go out of business. It's hard to tell what the government should and shouldn't do. At most it should enforce breach of contract, and maybe build our roads (since I totally don't understand how privatization of roads would work,) but why couldn't private companies do these same things? That way things the public disagreed with, malpractice, and bad business would be eliminated by running out of money. Corruption is the only thing I could think of; but why would a company be corrupt when it could easily be an honest business and stay in business?

With democracy, we exclude the rights of the individual (I never understood why, if three fourths of a group of people agree with someone, it trumps the ideas of the remaining fourth.) With voting, we have to choose the lesser of two evils to tell us how to live? Even a monarchy is better than a democracy (well, not really) but in principal, electing someone for four years gives them the time to get as much money as possible and get out, where monarchy at least has their kids to think about in the future and how they'll run the country. With self-interest, those same people getting elected, and getting all that money, could just be making money in a legitimate business, right? We have tons of people, all voting for things for the government to do, when all the things are different things? Isn't this just years and years of compromise after compromise that takes a ton of time to reverse? Why do we even have leaders, when we could, alternately, let businesses be our leaders and our money be our vote? Isn't that true democracy? That way those that disagree could spend their money elsewhere. If one business sucks; start another. If the public agrees, the business will flourish.

As long as we respect private property and contracts, where's the problem? I think if we have to have some sort of state, it should be something that respects private property, contracts and something that resembles the bill of rights (do what you want as long as it doesn't affect others.) Bribing companies could be punishable by death according to the contract if such a strong government wasn't there to say they couldn't. What better way to prevent corruption? Why does the government ban things? Why is unpasteurized milk illegal? Why are drugs illegal? Why is prostitution illegal? Why do we call ourselves a free country when we can't put what we want into our own bodies, and also create legitimate products to sell to people who want them (like drug users and their customers?) Not that drug use is condoned at all, but whose dumb idea was it to ban them all? Why put people in prison for their own self-destructive behavior? It's a "public" health problem? A public health problem is all the crime associated with prostitution and illegal drug smuggling/use/production/sale, and then using public money to put these people in jail, businessmen and victims of drug use alike. Banning things don't stop things, they make them considerably worse. Aren't syringes illegal? That's going to stop people? Maybe by killing off all the opium heads by getting STI's. Making meth illegal only makes those addicted use products that have tons of adulterants in them, so why not let a real company make this horrible drug? Better of the two evils, in my opinion. Why is prostitution illegal? Aren't people able to do what they want with themselves? They're going to do it anyway, so why not let them do it somewhere safe? And who has the authority to tell these people what they can't do? Does some magical degree make people more qualified to tell people what they can and can't do, despite how they don't have the intellectual capacity to know that trying to stop them won't work? Maybe people would stop being prostitues because it's a horrible job, not because of a law.

Why is polygamy (and the female equivalent to which I don't know the word) illegal? Why is gay marriage illegal? Why does the state even legitify marriage? Isn't that a religious thing?  Why is regulation done by the government? So many people disagree with the FDA, so why not make it a private company so it can go out of business if it doesn't do its job correctly. Why not let food manufacturers choose who they want to regulate their food. People could be loyal to their own organic regulation company and only buy products regulated from them. The non-aggression principal is something that I don't understand why anyone should disagree with. Why should the government tell us how to live? Why should they be able to take forty percent of our income from taxes and spend it however they please? People earn their money, so why aren't they able to choose if it goes to welfare or war? Why not stop taking their money so they have the money to choose? Would self-interest destroy society? People make a product; someone buys a product, uses the money to make more product. What does the government do that no one would want to do otherwise? Public parks? Why not a "coca-cola" public park? Sounds like good advertisement to me.

People say libertarianism is selfish, and I find it to be the opposite, since it allows people to do what they want to do. It seems much more selfish to tell other people what to do, even if it's one's opinion that it's in their best interest. Why do all these things the government restricts us with exist? It's because humans are usually pretty compassionate. And if they're not compassionate, it's probably in their best interest that those around them are happy so they don't get killed by making the less compassionate angry? Those that run the government are no smarter than us, and their collective compromise results in them all being dumber than even one of us. Why can we just print more money? I read somewhere, but I'm not even sure if it's true, that the federal reserve doesn't even print money sometimes, but it's more of a "let's move a decimal place on a computer. Yay money." Isn't the federal reserve a bunch of people that get paid money to do whatever they want? They can't go out of business. I'm not an economic genius that knows exactly why what they do doesn't work, but I don't think it takes a genius to know that we can just ruin the value of a dollar based on some random people (who weren't elected, yes?) move decimal places on the computer. Doesn't this cause inflation? Oh, that's a good thing for the government, isn't it? Do savings inflate as the same rate as the value of the dollar go down? A twenty is valued as a hundred dollars from the seventies, right? Does that mean if someone had money in the bank in the seventies, it's now worth considerably less?