Individualist: When is forcing people to live by rules they don’t agree with to suit your own belief system not slavery?
Statist: When it’s in their own best interest.

Ind: But how can you assume what’s in someone else’s best interest?
Sta: When it’s in my best interest.

Ind: So are you assuming that because you want something, others want the same thing?
Sta: I only listen to experts and make my decisions off of their intelligent opinions.

Ind: So you’re using the opinions of people you trust in to justify forcing other people to do as you believe?
Sta: People don’t always make the best decisions for their own lives.

Ind: So if we can’t trust people to make the best decisions for themselves, how can we trust your decisions for your own life, much less someone else’s?
Sta: I listen to experts.

Ind: What if the experts are wrong?
Sta: They’re never wrong.

Ind: So they’re not human?
Sta: Sometimes they’re wrong, but better that we use informed choice with some mistakes than ignorant choice with lots of mistakes.

Ind: Einstein once said that “Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.”
Sta: Your point?

Ind: The intelligence of one man in one area of life might be stupid when applied to another man’s life, and vice versa. Sometimes book smarts completely miss reality. I’d rather listen to grandma than a PhD when it comes to a happy life. No one can choose best how I should live my life, because its mine, with my own beliefs, passions and pursuits.
Sta: But we can all live in peace by unifying a few core beliefs.

Ind: Your idea of core beliefs are not shared by everyone. And we already did that when we instituted freedom over tyranny through a liberty-minded constitution. You only want your particular brand of freedom.
Sta: My brand if freedom is best for everyone! If they won’t do it for themselves, I’ll do it for them!

Ind: To imagine a man is incapable of learning from his own poor decisions is to consider him less of a human you are. Just as every man learns life best from experience, so, too, are those who would eat too much, sleep with unfamiliar partners, live unhealthy lifestyles to promote diseases of the heart, kidney, belly and lungs, and commit thousands of tiny decisions to their own detriment, all dependent on you finding a way to remove the consequences of their negative behavior.
Sta: But some people are innocent of the diseases which befall them, from cancer to poverty! Should we shuck them off with belittling ideas that their problems are not shared among us?

Ind: If they were a hermit living alone in the wilderness, on whom could they demand help from? Just because a man has a problem doesn’t obligate his neighbor to solve it for him. Would you force people into slavery to share our miseries?
Sta: And our wealth.

Ind: But it’s not our wealth. It’s my wealth. Or your wealth.
Sta: That’s greedy.

Ind: And your desire to own that which you have not earned is somehow benevolent?
Sta: But it’s for the poor!

Ind: Then help them!
Sta: I am!

Ind: With the money of other people?
Sta: I don’t have enough, myself!

Ind: No one does. States like Russia spent all their money to lift up the poor and it only made the entire country poor.
Sta: We won’t make the same mistakes.

Ind: As China? Russia? Italy? Germany? North Korea?
Sta: You ignore places like Sweden and Norway.

Ind: Who can handle neither strong growth nor sharp population increase. Your statism froze their economies in place, and they cannot handle change. Humanity isn’t naturally stable and cannot be stabilized by force. Every attempt only makes fertile ground for tyranny and revolution.
Sta: Stupid people need to stop breeding anyway.

Ind: Those “stupid people” are humans first, and without simple people none of us would be here. We are all descendents of uncultured farmers and woodsmen who didn’t need higher theory to know that a man must earn his pay, respect others who respect him, live by a personal faith and take care of other people to their own benefit.
Sta: And those people who fall between the cracks?

Ind: Are going to know far better how to climb out of those cracks once you stop spoon feeding them other people’s hard-earned money. Responsible people help the poor — not by throwing money at them, but by teaching them how to manage their money and then expecting them to get to work.
Sta: It’s not easy finding a job.

Ind: It would be easier if you stopped taking the very money small businesses would use to hire new people and giving it to them without working for it.
Sta: You can’t guarantee they would be hired.

Ind: I can’t guarantee you’ll live to see tomorrow, either. None of us is guaranteed tomorrow. We are entitled only to our freedom. I do not own you, nor you me. Your money is not mine and my miseries are not yours.
Sta: Wealth can be spread around.

Ind: As well you come to steal crops I grow or lumber I cut, for that is all money is — representative of my hard work. And to imagine that all my work and ingenuity are somehow forfeit to others who do not earn it is paramount to saying that all I am and can accomplish are subject to your desires and needs. I do believe that is called “slavery.”
Sta: How dare you! I’m not some white southernor and you’re not some black slave!

Ind: First of all, what you said IS racist, to imagine only white people are apt to enslave and only black people ever to have been slaves. Your narrow vision of slavery limits your ability to see its pervasive nature in society, where coercion of one group over another will surely subjugate the valuable mind of one individual under the greedy mind of another.
Sta: All you address is theory, not the hard facts.

Ind: You want pragmatism, then? Pragmatism justified the murder of 80 million Russian citizens under the Soviet Union’s efforts for internal peace. Socialist Germany used science to dehumanize the Jews and justify their slaughter. Those are hard facts. You can keep your pragmatism when men forget the timeless values of individual worth, earning your keep, mutually beneficial trade, the rights of free speech and bearing arms in favor of mass murder.
Sta: But my pragmatism helps people!

Ind: While hurting others. Your government is playing favorites, saying the poor are morally superior to the not-poor, and are thus entitled to what the not-poor have earned. Hard reality? Poverty sucks, and the most powerful agent of its reduction is and has ever been freedom, not state support. Freedom to suffer for poor decisions. Freedom to grow angry and tired with your lot and to do better for yourself. Freedom to bear children you cannot afford and then have to pay for them yourself, teaching them not to follow the life of mistakes you led and pushing them to rise.
Sta: But our society locks them into place! They cannot leave their poverty!

Ind: How?
Sta: Racism keeps people down!

Ind: Our president has black skin. Your argument is invalid. Try again.
Sta: They can’t afford the nice things other people have! Their education isn’t as good as others!

Ind: So they don’t have the same books?
Sta: They live in dangerous neighborhoods and have terrible teachers. They don’t have the same opportunities!

Ind: In the same public education system statists created? One funded by everyone? You mean throwing money at the problem didn’t help? Are you blaming the quality of the books or the culture which discourages education by saying it’s a “white” thing to do?
Sta: You’re oversimplifying the problem.

Ind: And you’re trying to obscure the fact that the culture is to blame, a culture of dependence created by state programs to lift people from poverty and have only served to keep most of them exactly where they are. Your programs of force are short-term fixes that create millions of unintended consequences that rippled across the organic fabric of cultural evolution. It’s like trying to force winter into spring because of your moral supposition that to be cold is immoral. Lack of money is not a moral condition, nor is it immoral that some should have lots of money and others to have very little. The only moral condition is how people treat each other, and whether one’s wealth or another’s poverty were found through immoral measures.
Sta: But it’s wrong that some should have so much and others so little.

Ind: As well to call the Jamaicans evil for their abundance of warm sunshine and beautiful blue oceans and the eskimos victims for their lives of icy austerity up in the great white north. Neither is permanently bound by their condition and both are subject to the cultures which bore them to their lifestyles.
Sta: But it’s unfair to the children!

Ind: And so now it’s your responsibility to save other people’s children from their parents?
Sta: If their parents are abusive.

Ind: Reality isn’t abuse. It’s just tough. People learn best when they see reality for what it is, not what you believe it to be, and so long as you keep trying to “educate” them on what reality “should” be versus what reality is, you’ll never actually help solve the problems that persist. You’ll only give people a fantasy of what it should be based on your personal moral code that others should fund what you believe, thus subjugating the success of some to the failure of others. True freedom means the wheel of society turns — some will be at the top, some will be at the middle, and some at the bottom, but freedom allows all to pass among these areas without great hindrance. So long as you teach people that they are different and are thus deserving of handouts, you will forever lock the have-nots as victims and have-alots as immoral rich. Instead, know that we all have the same potential for success and opportunity to fail. It is our decision to leave our culture and strike out  toward the pure, unfiltered pursuit of success that we truly find the American dream that drew so many immigrants throughout history fleeing from nations who taught class warfare and reinforced castes. If we don’t hold everyone to the same standards of working to eat, of relying on voluntary charity over forced altruism, of allowing the poor to tire of their lot so as to fight for something better while removing the economic locks that prevent that rise such as tax brackets and beneficent racism, we will never truly realize the equality of a free humanity.
Sta: That’s not fair!

Ind: Again, your definition of fair.
Sta: But people suffer under your version of fair.

Ind: People suffer regardless of whose version of fair we live by. It’s reality. People will suffer.
Sta: We can end suffering!

Ind: As well to end winter.
Sta: We should do what we can.

Ind: Every single one of us to what he best can do for himself as the best way to keep us from adopting a lifestyle of suffering. Sounds harsh, but that serves humanity better in the long run.
Sta: That’s more fair to some than to others.

Ind: Again, your definition of fair, and thus biased.
Sta: And yours isn’t?

Ind: That’s the point. We’re both biased, because we’re both intelligent individuals who chose for ourselves what to believe. You should have no more a right to force your beliefs on me than me upon you, which is why reducing the government’s ability to interfere in individual lives is so vital to our continued peace.
Sta: But getting rid of government IS your bias!

Ind: Which disarms me as much as it disarms you.
Sta: But then we can’t help people!

Ind: Sounds like you simply don’t believe in your own ability to make a difference without the power to force others to do what you believe is right. Last time I checked, that’s still called slavery.
Sta: I’m done with this conversation.