Your Right to Free Speech, Like My Right to Self-Defense, Isn’t Open to Debate

Today, some students, teachers, and other Americans who share their views are walking out of classes across the country to call for limits on the right of free assembly. Wait, strike that. They're walking out of classes to call for further restrictions on protections against unreasonable search and seizure. Nope, that's not it either. Wait, I have it: they're protesting for greater regulation of self-defense rights. Yup, there we go.

Of course, they're exercising their free speech rights in the process, and that's as it should be (although at least some of the kids have been conscripted into exercising somebody else's free speech rights by school officials who expect that their charges will adhere to officially endorsed positions). After all, the exercise of individual rights shouldn't be subject to popular opinion or debate.

Why shouldn't the exercise of individual rights be subject to popular opinion or debate? Well, that's a philosophical question. From my perspective, as well as that of many libertarians and classical liberals, individuals are sovereign beings free to do as they please so long as they don't cause each other actual harm. To the limited extent that government has any legitimacy, it can act only to prevent people from injuring one another—"the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others," as John Stuart Mill put it. The potential for injuring one another in the exercise of our liberty isn't enough to justify government action since that's inherent in just being alive and the having the ability to contemplate mischief.

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