Sunday, April 25, 2021

Rebel, but make it responsible

(My Eastern New Mexico News column for March 31, 2021)




This past year has been hard on liberty.

It started with world-wide government overreaction to a pandemic. This was still going strong when some focus shifted to choosing a politician to run your life. 

Recently, as the pandemic hype began to fizzle in many places and after most of the post-election drama had faded, the push to further violate your natural human right to own and to carry weapons was triggered by the horrible crimes of a few evil losers. Making good people helpless won't make bad people harmless.

If it wasn't one thing it was another.

This has probably always been the case, but sometimes it feels worse. This has been one of those times.

Did the past year signal the end of liberty, or just put a few more nails in its coffin?  Is liberty under a greater threat these days or is it only a matter of perception? I hope it's the latter, even though I suspect it's the former. I plan to pry some of those coffin nails out before it's too late to salvage what we're losing. I hope you'll help.

The question is, how can this problem be fixed?

Most people don't think about liberty very often. It may even scare them if they do. They won't miss it until it's so far gone it will be hard to win back.

Liberty is responsibility and people don't like responsibility. Too many people want to believe someone else is protecting them and doing the thinking so they won't have to. I hope you're not among those who want to be treated like a child, needing 'round-the-clock supervision and care. But if so, government is happy to oblige.

It's easier to control a population of people who won't think for themselves and who feel dependent on you. Those who don't want to be shielded from the real world are a danger to those whose plans require mindless compliance.

Most people comply too quickly.

It's going to take commitment to win back the liberty which has been lost. Part of that commitment will involve standing against politicians and the legislation they impose.

Rebel, but rebel responsibly. Good people never intentionally harm another's life, liberty, or property as a way to show they can think and act for themselves. They rebel only as a way to responsibly exercise their rightful liberty. Do you have it in you to stand for liberty?

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Don't follow the crowd unless you really think they're right


One thing that DemoCRAPublicans commonly do is to follow "their" crowd no matter how dumb the position is. In my experience, libertarians are less likely to do this. 

This is why you'll find libertarians disagreeing so strongly over certain issues.

Sometimes, there is a way to see something from multiple angles that seem incompatible with each other, and a good case to be made from multiple sides.

I have no doubt that consistent, smart libertarians can be on both sides (or perpendicular to those sides) of the abortion debate, because I've talked with them. 

Some think of "maximum liberty" as only achievable with a "night watchman" state; others think any state is necessarily less liberty than is optimal. 

Some think liberty relies on morality, some think it only requires individual ethics in those willing to live by them.

Other topics are much the same. 

Yes, sometimes someone is wrong and someone is right-- and you can't tell by which side has more popular support. Sometimes there's no way to know for sure which is which, and sometimes there is. As long as we don't sink to using (or threatening to use) government violence on each other over differing opinions, I think we'll work it out eventually. Or, keep arguing over it into the distant future. That still seems better to me than some elite declaring "The science is settled!" as if that makes it so and delegitimizes further discussion.

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