"Society is just a group of individuals..."

Thomas Bowden of The Ayn Rand Institute has weighed in on the California homeschool ruling. In Your child is not state property, Mr. Bowden says, in part:

California legislators were entitled to enact this blanket prohibition, according to the judge, because they feared the supposed social disorder that would result from "allowing every person to make his own standards on matters of conduct in which society as a whole has important interests."

"Allowing"? By what right does government presume to "allow" (or, in this case, forbid) you to make your own standards concerning your child's education?

Government has no such right. Neither the state nor "society as a whole" has any interests of its own in your child's education. A society is only a group of individuals, and the government's only legitimate function is to protect the individual rights of its citizens, including yours and your children's, against physical force and fraud. The state is your agent, not a separate entity with interests that can override your rights. [Emphasis added.]
(Copyright © 2008 Ayn Rand® Institute. All rights reserved.)

There are several discussions currently taking place on a few of my favorite online haunts that relate to the misconception of "society as a whole" in regard to the role the government and state play in the lives of individuals. I wish I had the time to adequately participate in each of those conversations and explain to whomever would listen that regulation breeds regulation, that a citizen cannot control the interpretation or application of a law once it is enacted, and that government programs aimed at helping those who cannot/will not help themselves is theft from those of us who can/will.

I will sum it up by saying this: The compromises (or "sacrifices") that many of us are blindly willing to make with the government in exchange for a perceived benefit for "society as a whole" always, always, always come with undeclared strings attached. Those strings represent loss of personal freedom.

Society is not served by these actions, because society is a group of--what? Individuals. There is no mutually exclusive relationship between society and the individual. One depends on the other for its very existence:

Without the preservation of individual rights, there is no society.