The first day of the year comes cold and hard in Arkansas. The trees stand bare and the wind moves through them like an uninvited guest. It is a time to look at the ground we’ve plowed and the fields we’ve yet to sow. And as the New Year stretches out before us, there is no better time to talk of freedom and the shackles that bind it.
Freedom is a simple thing. It is the man who works his land and keeps his harvest. It is the woman who speaks her mind and bears no fear of reprisal. It is the young man or woman with the strength of youth in their bones, knowing they owe their lives to no master. But in Arkansas, as in many places, the simple things have been made hard by laws that choke the spirit of the people like weeds choking a crop.
Consider the tax laws. A man works with his hands or his mind, and the state comes to take what he has earned. They call it a duty or a responsibility, but it is theft all the same. The income tax takes from the worker. The sales tax punishes the buyer. The property tax ensures that no man can truly own his land, for he must pay the state each year to keep it. This is not liberty. This is a slow kind of servitude, masked with kind words.
And then there are the laws against the simple pleasures of life. The state meddles in what a man may drink, smoke, or carry in his pocket. Prohibition is long gone, but the spirit of it remains in the laws that govern alcohol, tobacco, and marijuana. A man grows a plant or distills his own drink, and the state calls him a criminal. These laws are not about safety or health. They are about control, about keeping the people cowed and compliant.
The tyranny spreads further still into how we educate our children. Compulsory education laws bind families to a state curriculum, as if the bureaucrat knows better than the parent. And there are laws that make it hard for a family to choose homeschooling or private schools without jumping through hoops set by men who have never met their children. A child is not the property of the state, and yet the state acts as if it owns the young.
What is the answer? It is simple. We must tear out these weeds, root and all. We must push back against every law that takes from the man what is rightfully his—his money, his choices, his children. Freedom does not come in half-measures. A man is either free, or he is not. The fight will not be easy. The state is a creature that grows fat on the labor and compliance of its people, and it will not go quietly.
But on this New Year’s Day, let us resolve to fight it all the same. To live free, and to let others live free, too. For freedom is the only thing worth fighting for. And a man who does not fight for it is already lost.
Happy New Year. Let us make it a year of liberty.
