All laws make you less free. Laws exist to restrict freedoms in order to create a better society - what a better society means is the part where political differences come up. Most people can agree on laws existing to prevent harm unto others, but then what does that mean? Answers depend on your values and goals, and are fundamentally what politics are.
The point is though, all laws make someone "less free", because the purpose of law is to prohibit.
The law establishing public libraries doesn‘t just say "let there be public libraries". It designates a source for funding, making it a reason that taxpayers are less free. It forces publishers to sell/give books to the libraries.
If it could just exist without restricting someone‘s freedom in the wider sense, we wouldn‘t need a law.
> Privately funded libraries didn't need any laws.
Not sure if this was meant to be a troll, but obviously private libraries depend on someone enforcing private ownership in general. Public libraries have some very specific legal carveouts (e.g. around protecting patron privacy) but otherwise are treated the same as private libraries, only publicly funded.
Lol. Libraries are huge buyers of books and drive demand.
Publishing wouldn’t exist without libraries. Something like 90% of book retail space has vaporized, and the ruthless consolidation makes the top 50 authors utterly dominate sales.
This is one of the problems with polarization. The legitimate points of one side get grouped in with all the other ridiculous crap.
Every law, every program has a cost. Many times this costs are worth it. And there are plenty of times where they aren't, or have unintended side-effects.
Pointing out these costs and forcing society to recognize them as explicit decisions and tradeoffs is one of the key benefits of the Right, even if you disagree on where they fall on the balance of net-benefits in the final analysis.
> Pointing out these costs and forcing society to recognize them as explicit decisions and tradeoffs is one of the key benefits of the Right
I don't think either side is better or worse at this. It's more like, point out the costs of the other side's policies while glossing over the costs of your own.
Abortion is a great example. I never hear a pro-life argument that starts out "abortion should be illegal but it will create all these unwanted babies and here's what I propose we do about that and what it will cost. We'll vote on outlawing abortion but it will be tied to tax increases to pay for programs to ensure these children have proper nutrition and education."
The idea that the right cares about babies right up until the moment you're born is common enough that George Carlin was joking about it in the 70s.
This is not true at all. We have many laws which restrict the government. Many amendments do this. Or the Respect for Marriage Act as a recent example, which restricts what the government can prohibit and provides for marriage rights for people who might not otherwise have them.
What about a law that says you are entitled to a lawyer when arrested? Or a law that says if you overpay on your taxes, the government has to make you whole?
There's the 'arrested' part and the 'taxes' part. There are limitations on the power we give the government to arrest people and to collect taxes. But the limitations are only there because of the freedom we loose in exchange for criminals being arrested and public services paid for.
If there was a law that said everyone must only wear blue clothes on Wednesdays, that's taken away your freedom to choose what to wear. If there's an exception to that law that says socks can be either green or blue, that's not the law granting a new freedom to wear green socks, it's a law not taking away a freedom that existed before the blue clothing law.
The point is though, all laws make someone "less free", because the purpose of law is to prohibit.