You can solve problems or play politics

(My Eastern New Mexico News column for August 22, 2018)

When you imagine solving some problem, what kind of solution do you envision: permanent or political? Win-win or win-lose? How would you rather fix things? Permanently and where everyone wins, or politically where someone wins at the expense of others who are harmed?

If you choose the political option, those you harm will keep trying to turn the tables. They may claim to only want to stop the harm they are suffering, but when they get the chance they'll repay everything they suffered, with interest, and the problem will keep coming back.

This shows the difference between using the economic method to fix things or the political method to kick the can down the road a ways.

Sometimes you'll even run into someone who doesn't really want a solution. Often, as in the case of crime, they profit too much off the problem-- financially or politically-- to want it gone. This is behind much of the resistance to ending both drug prohibition and "gun control". A solved problem makes political power evaporate. Certain people fear this happening.

But why hand your destiny to sociopaths? Work around them. Ignore them. Shut them out of the conversation. Find solutions in spite of their stubbornness.

True solutions will never violate natural human rights nor stand in the way of exercising those rights; of living your liberty.

I can't respect those who believe your rights and liberty are subject to their opinions (which they'll call "laws"), and who back their opinions with threats of violence (known as "law enforcement"). I don't understand this type of thinking.

Your right to live in liberty doesn't scare me, because liberty is self-regulating. You can never have too much liberty since you never have the right to violate others. Your liberty to do anything you want stops where the other person's rights begin. No outside force, beyond self-defense, is needed.

You only get the liberty you respect in others. If you don't respect the rights of others, you seem to be giving others permission to ignore your rights, too.

If I invite you into my home or business I'm never going to ask you to leave your rights at the door. If I'm afraid of what you might do, why invite you in? It doesn't make sense.

Liberty can solve so many problems, but you have to want the problem solved before you'll consider it. How about you? Do you want to solve problems, or would you rather keep doing politics?

-
Thank you for helping support KentforLiberty.com

Defense against the Dark Arts (of Archators)

Those who are against you owning and carrying effective weapons, and using them to defend life, liberty, and property, like to pretend the bad guy is your ethical equal. That his death, as a consequence of his attack on you, is some sort of tragedy.

For an anti-gun bigot to say that using a gun in self-defense "costs a life" makes it sound as though you traded a random innocent life for your life. As if, one day for no apparent reason, you feel threatened so you go out, find some little kid who is minding her own business and kill her as she sits at her "unlicensed" lemonade stand so you can live. It's not like that at all. (That's more along the lines of how The Blue Line Gang operates.)

Instead, in such a case, someone has chosen to show you they don't value your life. I would say they also don't value their own life as much as they value their desire for attacking you or taking your stuff. They are trading their life for their desire to violate you. They decided on the "game", they know the rules, so the outcome is on them when it doesn't go how they'd like.

It's not that they "lose their right to self-defense" once they attack you. Rights can't be "lost". But their right to self-defense doesn't do away with your right to self-defense, your right to not be molested, and your right to not have your property rights damaged-- at their hands. In the current circumstance, chosen by the archator, you have the biggest stack of rights at stake. I hope when the smoke clears the archator is on the losing end. Every time. If fairness were a feature of reality, that's how it would be. Since it isn't, you need to do all you can to stack the deck in your favor.

The bad guys, including the anti-liberty bigots, aren't going to cut you any slack.

-

This blog is my job.
YOU get to decide if I get paid.