These days, it seems everyone expects instant gratification, perceives entitlements that they haven’t earned or inherited, don’t deserve.  That’s one side of the coin.  On the other side (still the same coin,) there are those who claim right to control the behaviors of others, at the expense of their civil liberties.  Unwarranted censorship is performed by moderators of online forums — people telling other people what they may or may not say, and how they may and may not express those sentiments.  This is done under the guise of representing the best interest of the members as a whole, but most often is simply the result of a control freak being put in charge of that forum.  Put it in the context of a corporeal situation.  Who would tolerate someone asserting himself so deeply in a conversation between two other people? So long as they aren’t shouting, creating an unavoidable disturbance, they should be free to express whatever sentiment they want, whatever way they want.  If the other party doesn’t care for it, he’s free to terminate the conversation in any number of ways.  If others don’t care to hear it, they don’t need to listen.  Similarly at the forum, if I don’t care for a someone’s mindset, I am able to choose not to read that person’s posts.  If I do so, that’s on me.  Nothing which can be expressed online (short of libel, of course,) is going to harm someone else, so We The People have neither vested interest nor right to control that expression.

The price of liberty, then, is Tolerance.  We must tolerate others’ exercising of their liberties, if we are to enjoy those same rights ourselves.  In a perfect world, that wouldn’t be all that hard to do.  But it isn’t a perfect world, and we’re not perfect beings.  There are times when even the most level-headed amongst us wants to tell someone else to shut up, to stop spewing what we know to be false or find objectionable.  Liberty requires that we not do so.  What we can do is to express a compelling argument contrary to their position.  That is our prerogative.  Silencing the opposing view, no matter how roughly expressed, is not amongst our choices in a free society.

Some might argue that it falls within the providence of the person who owns or has rented the property where the conversation (or online discussion) is occurring.  Heaven, reason and freedom forbid!  Then the landlord becomes a tyrant, imposing his or her own perspective upon others.  Unwittingly or not,  intentionally or not, corruption by such power  is inevitable.

If we are to enjoy and preserve liberty, we must preserve it for all sentient creatures to enjoy.  That is the high price of liberty.  Oddly enough, it has direct parallels with the Golden Rule, which states “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”  That, too, seems simple enough at the outside, but proves much more difficult in practice.

Censorship, initiation of Force, absolute property rights, and other concepts are part and parcel of libertarian concepts.  In ways, these are more radical than Right-Wing Conservatism, but they’re more reasonable.  The problem is that all members of a libertarian society must agree to levels of responsibility much higher than our U.S. society has known in nearly 200 years.  And now we’ve come full circle, to the Age of Entitlement, and the way that people want rights without responsibilities.  Not wrong to want for it, but extremely unlikely to find in the realm of reality.  What, then, is the high price of Liberty?  Liberty itself, for everyone.