Serving the High Plains
Serving the High Plains
Legislation, which many people incorrectly call “law,” doesn’t reduce crime. It can’t. In fact, each new bit of legislation creates at least one more crime -- often several more -- and many more criminals as a result. People who weren’t criminals before are now, for doing things that weren’t crimes yesterday, but which are now arbitrarily declared to be.
Every time anything is criminalized it creates new criminals. That’s really the only thing it does. Anyone who doesn’t understand this correlation shouldn’t be in a position of power over the lives of others.
Murder doesn’t need to be illegal for it to be a real crime. You would still have the right and the obligation to defend against murderers. The only thing accomplished by making murder illegal is to allow government to punish it at your expense; an unnecessary complication.
To seek to address crime with more legislation is actually going backward if your goal is to reduce crime. If the goal is to give the state more ways to punish people who don’t do what the politicians wish they’d do, then I suppose it works. It’s not productive, though.
If you want to fight crime you need to stop pretending something can be a crime even though it has no specific individual victim -- someone whose life, liberty, or property has been harmed intentionally by someone else. Mutually consensual acts don’t create a victim and the state can’t be a victim.
If there’s such a thing as a drug crime, it involves someone misrepresenting their product. Maybe the weight or the purity are not as advertised, or it’s stolen property. For that matter, drug prohibition enforcement is the biggest drug crime, since it attempts to punish mutually consensual trade.
There are plenty of other examples which show, again, that government legislation is the source of most crime.
If you’re serious about reducing crime, abolish or simply ignore all the legislation responsible for creating it. Leave the people alone to live as they see fit as long as they violate no one else’s rights. Let people defend themselves and their property without the risk of being victimized afterward by the state’s legislation enforcement and prosecution gangs.
Crime is a problem. Making it a bigger problem than it naturally has to be is not smart but is counterproductive and antisocial. It’s long past time to scale it back and start heading in the right direction for a change.
Farwell’s Kent McManigal champions liberty. Contact him at: