@ nobody

Most people are wrong about rights. Rights are viewed as something that is granted, something that people fight to get, and something that people ought to have. But that is all wrong. In fact, that line of thinking is dangerous, and leads to the types of human rights violations that we are seeing across the planet today - everywhere from third-world countries, to the "great" countries like the United States. In this essay, I will explain what rights are, where they come from, and why the prevalent line of thinking is dangerous to society. ## Rights are granted by God I'm a Christian, and I know who my God is. You don't have to be a Christian, or even a believer to understand and agree with the concept that rights are a fundamental, and exist above the human condition. I think it makes the argument much stronger if one does believe in a god, but even a non-believer can arrive at the conviction, after deliberation, that rights are not dependent upon human thought or consideration. They are inherent in the Universe, and a fundamental truth. The authors of the Declaration of Independence believed this, which is why they wrote: > We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. What the founders understood, and many of us have lost sight of, is that our rights are not something granted to us by humans, or by governments (which are just collections of humans), but by something above us which cannot be argued with. These rights are absolute and part of the fundamental nature of what it means to be human. They are "unalienable" meaning that they cannot become foreign to us - we cannot be separated from our rights. They are not bridgeable. > Government is not reason; it is not eloquent; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master. > -- George Washington We must leave behind the common fallacy that governments can grant or suspend the rights of individuals. They may *violate* or *recognize* those rights, but they have no power over what those rights are, or whether they belong to you. When governments tell their populations that they may do a thing, that is *permission*, not a right. Permissions may be revoked or suspended, rights may not. ## Governments are not gods One of the great revolutions in the development of humankind took place during the feudalistic era. The development of chivalry represented a fundamental change in the way populations learned to view their rulers. Previously, Kings (and sometimes Queens) were viewed as deities in their own right - the ultimate authorities over all affairs both material and spiritual. Under chivalry, for the first time, we collectively realized that rulers were only human, and they were beholden to a higher power the same way the rest of us were. > Today, government is taking those rights from us, pretending that it gives us our rights. Indeed, those rights come from God, and it was recognized throughout our history as such. > -- Judge Roy Moore While the process was slow, and not without its setbacks and problems, this began the path towards the recognition of universal human rights, the limitation of the powers of rulers to protect their citizens from abuse, and ultimately, forms of representative government under constitutions, such as the constitutional monarchy and the constitutional republic. It was a gradual change in the way entire populations viewed the world around them and their place in it. They saw both the errant human in their rulers, and the *highest ideal* that all man was answerable to. > If we are not governed by God, then we will be ruled by tyrants. > -- William Penn Unfortunately, there has been a gradual regression taking place. People no longer look to that highest ideal any longer for their answers. Very often, they are turning to government for the solutions to their problems, protection from every danger, and answers for how it is acceptable to live. This creates a false image, that government is anything other than people exactly like us, with the same flaws, limitations, and corruption that lives in every single living human. Government is not here to help us, because government *is* us. Government cannot tell us how to live, or what our rights are, because government is just people, who unregulated have been shown to commit every type of atrocity to gain power and wealth for themselves. > Because many of us make mistakes that can have bad consequences, some intellectuals believe that it is the role of government to intervene and make some of our decisions for us. From what galaxy government is going to hire creatures who do not make mistakes is a question they leave unanswered. > -- Thomas Sowell ## The role of government Government is a cooperation of groups of people, meant to establish guidelines (laws) that are acceptable to the majority of individuals in order to maximize freedom, happiness, and safety from the infringement of those rights. Any deviation from this goal is a perversion of government. >Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one. >-- Thomas Paine Freedom and laws stand in a necessary tension with one another. Laws must govern the passions of humankind, to guard against one person violating the rights of another. But laws have a fascinating life of their own. They tend to grow over time as disputes are heard and government is asked to intervene in more and more cases. Can you think of a time that the number of laws actually decreased by any meaningful number during the life of a government? The issue is that laws also grant power to the enforcer of those laws. Human nature reenters the equation, stage left. Judges become corrupted to decide cases for their own benefit, or are bribed. The laws become so numerous that our representatives begin passing them to benefit themselves or their friends, and nobody notices in the sea of laws being passed. In the United States we have reached the point where laws are being passed so fast, and so often, and are so encompassing, that the representatives have often not even read them before they are passed. This is a terrible corruption of the system, as the people writing the laws were never even chosen by the people, and begin to exercise power over the lives of their fellow citizens, with no oversight, and no checks upon what they do. >The one thing man fears is the unknown. When presented with this scenario, individual rights will be willingly relinquished for the guarantee of their well-being granted to them by a World Government, a New World Order. >-- Henry A. Kissinger It is interesting, that a country that has existed for over 200 years, continues to find this many things to pass laws about. There are budgetary things that are routine (and still manage to be handled horribly) but we still pass thousands of *laws* every year. We would be foolish to think that these laws are all required to protect the rights of one citizen from encroachment by another. > Congress has enacted approximately 200–600 statutes during each of its 115 biennial terms so that more than 30,000 statutes have been enacted since 1789. > -- Wikipedia ## The slippery slope In this article, I have posited that rights are absolute, and inviolable. They may be in principle, but in practice, even the most conservative and rights loving individuals are often more than happy to violate the rights of others if the circumstances are right. This is a problem because **once you accept the violation of one person's rights, you have already surrendered the fight for rights entirely.** Indeed, you have conceded, and are now in negotiation about how many people's rights you are comfortable violating. Don't believe me? *Do you believe felons should have the right to vote and carry firearms after they serve the entirety of their sentence?* I'm willing to wager the average American, at least, is perfectly comfortable stripping felons of these rights. There are many such groups. But let's remember the founder's principle - these rights are unalienable. > There is no greater threat to a free and democratic nation than a government that fails to protect its citizen’s freedom and liberty as aggressively as it pursues justice. > -- Bernard B. Kerik, From Jailer to Jailed: My Journey from Correction and Police Commissioner to Inmate 84888-054 You might believe this is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. You might believe the justice system works, that it never convicts the innocent (or worse, that it's "good enough"), and that the justice system is never turned against a population minding its own business, trying to live its life quietly... you know, pursuing that "liberty and happiness" stuff. If you do, then I applaud you for being blind, deaf, and oblivious to the realities around you. I would urge you to consider carefully though, how long you think it will take a government that passes 200-600 laws every biennial term, to decide that something you are doing is a felony. You've already surrendered your rights for permissions in exchange for some safety and retribution. What are you going to think and feel the day the government declares war on Bitcoin, seizes your private property, or tells you how to raise your children? Do you really think they won't? We're over 50 years into a war on drugs. ## Don't Surrender Defending your rights means defending mine, and every other human being living around you. The minute their rights cease to be important to you - the moment you are willing to allow your fellow human being's rights to be violated in the name of "justice," "safety," or whatever reason the mob cries for, you have lost your own. It is only a matter of time before you notice. It takes a bigger person to stand up for the rights of those we find distasteful - but as with so many other medicines, what is good for us often tastes bad. As is so often the case, what is wrong with rights isn't rights themselves. What's wrong with rights is that as a people we have forgotten what they are, and been deluded into believing we still have them, and that they are granted by some vague thing called "the government" that is somehow greater than human, despite being instituted by and filled with humans. > You seem...to consider the judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions – a very dangerous doctrine indeed, and one which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy. Our Judges are as honest as other men, and not more so. They have, with others, the same passions for party, for power, and the privilege of their corps. > -- Thomas Jefferson, to William Charles Jarvis, September 28, 1820 The biggest defense of our own freedoms and rights we can exercise is to not tolerate the violation of anyone else's. They belong to all of us by birthright, granted to us by the *highest ideal* and are violated at our greatest peril.