Government vs Individual Liberties

I caught a little bit of Matt Kibbe (Mr Sideburns) on C-SPAN this morning and he was talking about Ayn Rand and individual freedom and how bad government was.

My thought was, do people have the right as individuals to choose to cooperate together to accomplish something better for everyone that they could not do for themselves? Is that not an individual choice?

Where would old folks be today if we had not chosen to have Social Security? How many more homeless and hungry would there be in this country? I doubt that it would be the 'paradise' that conservatives like Mr Kibbe suggest?

How many would be sick and dying if not for Medicare? Would we have a better society without the means to see a doctor whenever we got sick?

These are individual choices we have made collectively to accept. We have chosen to use government to help us individually. However, we could never do it alone. The choice to have a government is an individual choice. We use the individual vote to affirm or deny what the government can do.

Government is not some separate entity that came down from Mars and imposed itself upon our people. We choose the government we want. The right to vote is an individual liberty.