Moving along to another paragraph just stuffed full of wackiness:
"....many of the most common activities of the modern state – building roads and
highways, putting out fires, fighting disease, treating our sewage, providing
college loans, funding basic scientific research, providing medical care for the
elderly, supplying clean water, feeding the poor, providing parks and
recreational facilities, subsidizing farmers, educating our children,
forecasting the weather, sending out Social Security checks, and so on – are not
inherently coercive or oppressive at all."
Where to begin.... The things referenced in that excerpt, do not need to be done by government. They could probably be done honestly, and better, by competitive businesses or by charities (in other words: the market). Charities help those in need and do not breed dependency and futility like welfare (by any name) does. Welfare is the cruelest slavery.
Roads and highways are built upon land that was taken from someone. They are financed with money that was taken from someone. They are infested with highwaymen who enforce coercive "laws" in order to steal more money for the state, and who will not hesitate to kill travelers who dare to resist.
Not all of those who fight fires work for the state. Those who do, do so unethically. They should become independent of the coercive monopoly they work for and stop accepting stolen money for their work. There are many ways in which this could be done much better than the current system.
Nor do the best doctors who fight disease work for the state. To imagine that these family doctors and private specialists, who are on the "front lines", are doing less than the CDC is ridiculous.
Just because government currently controls water standards doesn't mean this is the best way. After all, the government controlled system breaks down easily, leaving people vulnerable. Smart people have contingency plans.
The poor were fed by charitable organizations and individuals long before government took over the job financing it with coercively taken money. Farm subsidies have turned many farmers into "welfare queens". And where does the author think the money in those Social "Security" checks comes from? It doesn't come from an account in the recipient's name; it is coercively taken from currently employed people. If that isn't coercive and oppressive then nothing is.
"Public" schools are good at educating? Really? "Public" schools do not educate; they indoctrinate. They make people grow up accepting the socialistic status quo as "the way things have always been, and must continue to be". In around a century and a half, "public" schools have just about destroyed literacy in America.
I could go on with this for an entire series of columns since almost every sentence in every article on the whole site is full of this kind of "error", in fact it gets even worse the farther you read, but this column (even split) is already too long, and you get the idea.
I think it is very important to confront such dangerous and dishonest assertions wherever they may be found. I encourage you to read the entire article, dissect the pathetic attempt at justifying the unjustifiable, and expose the "sleight-of-hand" used. I have even left some of the biggest lies for you to tear apart. Notice that, even though the author claimed in the first quote I used in yesterday's column that there is no "inevitable trade-off" between freedom and government, he then spends most of the article describing those trade-offs and explaining why they are for the "common good". Notice, especially, how the author uses government-created situations to justify more rights violations by government. Yet, we are to believe he doesn't see this hypocrisy? I'm not buying it.