"It’s like coercing someone into freedom."

I know the feeling. That's apparently the exact strategy employed by the statists of the world. Somehow, this false belief has been adopted: that you can use coercion to regulate and deny individual liberties and still call it "defending individual liberty."

I don't know where the breakdown occurs - whether it's with semantics or with concepts - but the proposition is entirely impossible. But I'm pretty sure that those who advocate it actually do understand it, because when you get down to the fundamentals of liberty, I have yet to come across anyone who truly believes that theirs should be arbitrarily violated. They'll hem and haw about consent and they'll collectivize rights that would otherwise not exist, but they never cede that you as an individual has any right whatsoever to violate theirs.

The cognitive dissonance is definitely real when it comes to statism. Once overcome, however, the truth is quite plain to see.