People find many reasons to reject liberty. Fear. Envy. Ignorance. Tradition. In fact, there are probably as many reasons to reject liberty as there are people on this planet.
Those whose careers depend on violating liberty will use any excuse they are handed.
If they use envy, they can impose socialism and raise taxes on the rich. They can make people believe they have a "right" to things which others must work to provide them. It can never be your right to enslave others!
Using ignorance, political criminals lie and hope that too few notice to do anything about it. It's how we get things like "assault weapon" rules, carbon credits, and the War on (some) Drugs.
They also combine ignorance with envy, so those cheated in the brain department will demand to be coddled to dumb down society so that no one feels stupid. Ignorance is simply a lack of knowledge; stupidity is a dedicated effort to remain ignorant.
Tradition, when applied to historical evils, is a particularly dangerous justification for rejecting liberty. Just because "it's always been done this way" doesn't mean it should continue to be done this way. When certain rights have been sacrificed in the past, it was wrong. It's wrong to violate rights now, even when ceasing to violate them is unthinkable. Slavery has been around for thousands of years, in every society all over the world. It was traditional everywhere. That's no reason to keep enslaving people.
Of all the reasons to reject liberty, fear may be the most common excuse, used even by some people who generally support liberty. Fear is the one thing politicians count on the most. They feed it, fan the flames, and lie about how much danger you'll be in if other people don't have their liberty crushed under the heel of The State. They'll construct nightmare outcomes they hope will scare you, so you'll beg for someone's liberty to be limited in some way. Liberty restricted is liberty violated. Nearly everyone has one fear a politician can use. You need principles to say "No".
The problem is, no matter what facet of liberty you want to consider, someone is deathly afraid of it. If your rights depended on not scaring anyone, you would have no rights. You would have no liberty to exercise.
Don't fall for any reason to reject liberty. Instead of rejecting liberty, reject the excuses used to justify violating it.
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Thank you for reading.
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