It’s none of my business how you organize your community, as long as it is consensual.

As long as you give the rest of us the same respect.

Therein lies the problem.

Pinch yourself. This deserves a headline: ‘Met Office shock announcement: Britain’s weather is normal.’

I usually prefer simply to say that I advocate libertarianism: liberty for all. I don’t mind saying that we have a strong prima facie right to have liberty and a duty to respect liberty. But that’s not intended to suggest that libertarianism is logically supported by, or even requires, deontologism. However, the real issue here is the common view that there are serious clashes in these approaches and in particular between deontologism and consequentialism. As far as I can tell, there aren’t systematic clashes in everyday practice between respecting libertarian rights and promoting human welfare. And so if one is advocating libertarianism as a practical ideology, then it’s irrelevant that we can imagine far-fetched or very rare cases where libertarian rights and human welfare clash. Therefore, it’s unnecessary to takes sides between rights and welfare.

The government argues that it's going to use the data to catch terrorists or potential terrorists who intend to violate rights of innocent people. The government is for sure invading our free speech rights against the slim possibility that terrorists will invade our lives. Which of these is a greater threat to us? Our own government's totalitarian moves in the past 10 years or potential terrorists who are being encouraged by our own government's activities overseas?

So, statists of all stripes (including classical liberals), by all means continue to reject genuine self-government and carry on with support of your blessed state. But know well that you are flirting with the most horrifyingly destructive institution ever devised, one that will almost certainly annihilate everyone in the end. Statist ideologies justify and support the state as a military/bureaucratic apparatus whose leaders are not held to the moral standards to which all other persons are commonly held. By making this wholly unwarranted moral distinction, the adherents of such ideologies place state leaders in a position to prepare for and to carry out actions that, if committed by anyone else, would be recognized immediately as the most egregious crimes against humanity. Statism, which leads people to tolerate the development, deployment, and use of WMDs, poses a grave threat to the survival of the human species.