On the Nature of Freedom

I'll be honest. I have no problem with a slight reduction in our personal liberties. Nor am I afraid of a little eavesdropping, or just a tiny bit of censorship. The problem is not with those things themselves, but what they invariably lead to. You can't have just a little bit of censorship. It snowballs. First you censor pornography, lunatics calling for the violent overthrow of the government, and so on. Then people in power begin censoring things that work against them or their party, but not neccessarily the people as a whole. From there, the whole thing declines very rapidly. That's why I'm opposed to censorship. Because it never stays "just a little bit". It expands. It crawls outwards. It strangles the very ideals it was supposed to protect. And no pornography or hate speech can do anything that ominous.