Freedom is the ability to act without the initiation of force (or its threat) being used against you.  You have a right to freedom because your life is your property, yours to live as you see fit (as long as you do not violate the right to life and liberty of another).

If you are free, you have the unfettered ability to pursue your own happiness, to make those choices needed for the sustenance of your own life.  In a semi-free society, such as we have today, your options are forcibly limited by statist politicians on the implicit claim that your life is not your own.  But take special note of this important fact: your ability, in a free society, to make unfettered choices is the consequence of being unfettered, i.e., of being unconstrained by the initiation of force.   "Having choices" is not the definition of freedom, it is simply one of the consequences of being free.

Now, consider your definition of freedom.  Is your definition corrupted, even if slightly, by the definition of freedom which has been put forth by statist politicians?

Statists define freedom as "having a choice," the kind of choices only available to an armed thug or a statist politician.  Consider the role this definition of "freedom" has played, and continues to play, in the rise of America’s welfare state—more accurately characterized as America’s parasite state, one in which some forcibly feed off of the earnings of others.  Having successfully substituted the statist definition of "freedom" in the minds of most, statists argue, to quote from Fatal Blindness, "that children of poor parents do not have the ‘freedom’ to attend the college of their choice or the ‘freedom’ to receive the very best medical care because of a lack of funds or that some struggling artists do not have ‘freedom’ of expression because they lack money…."  The logic of such arguments has driven, and continues to drive, statism’s rapacious growth, bringing us statist programs that forcibly take your money in order to provide others with more "freedom," all at the expense of forcibly denying you the freedom to decide how your money is to be spent.

Statists are all over the place offering new "freedoms," new choices made available through the initiation of government force.  By means of compulsion, statists make options available to some by denying free choice to others (which is what statists are attempting to do in the case of Microsoft in their attempt to force Microsoft to include Netscape in Windows 98).  In the name of "freedom," statists destroy actual freedom.  In the name of "choice," statists destroy actual, free choice.

We now have statists claiming that poor children are being denied equal access to the Internet, that we must provide them with the same "freedom" enjoyed by others, that you are to be forced to pay for computers for these poor children—which means: you are going to be forcibly denied the freedom to refuse to pay for such computers.

And now we have our chief statist, Clinton, pushing for a patient’s "bill of rights," for a new set of "freedoms" that will be acquired by means of the initiation of force, either forcing certain individuals to do certain things or forcibly forbidding them from doing some things—which means: certain individuals will be forcibly prevented from interacting voluntarily with others, destroying real freedom.   And if they can do it to these individuals, they can do it to you.