Do Natural Rights Exist Without Government ?

[Lonestar_logic]

Natural rights?

Show me one that any idiot with a gun cannot take away from YOU.

Religious freedom.

 

[M.D. Rawlings]

A concept that even conservatives get wrong is that government is supposed to secure our rights. That is wrong. Government is supposed to leave our rights alone.

Although inalienable, our rights are not absolute, and are subject to reasonable restrictions by government (see, e.g., Clark v. Community for Creative Non-Violence (1984), restricting the right to freedom of assembly.)

In the United States the Constitution codifies our rights in the context of its case law, placing limits on the extent to which government may indeed restrict our rights.

It is this balance between the rights of the individual and the authority of government, both subject to the rule of law, which safeguards our civil liberties.

The Constitution clearly affords Congress powers both enumerated and implied (McCulloch v. Maryland (1819)), and the people clearly intended and authorized government to form a more perfect Union, through laws and measures enacted pursuant to the Constitution and its case law.

The issue, therefore, is not “[g]overnment is supposed to leave our rights alone,” rather, it’s the doctrine of judicial review which acknowledges the right of the people to petition the government for a redress of grievances by filing suit in Federal court and compelling government to justify its efforts to place restrictions on citizens’ civil liberties, and when the government fails to justify those restrictions, the restrictions are invalidated.

The ‘the proper role of government,' consequently, is whatever the people and the courts determine it to be, through the democratic process and elections, or through the process of judicial review in the courts, and often times and ideally, both.

The proper role of government was determined by God from the beginning. Once again, you can be counted on to make academic baby talk with no real understanding about the realities of human nature and the imperatives of liberty.

This government is teetering on the brink of fascism because of thugs like you. Any human being with an IQ above that of a gnat and a respectable sense of morality can see that. And besides, you're a liar. Every classical liberal--conservative and libertarian--on this board knows you have absolutely no respect for the construct of inalienable rights anyway. And certainly I have shown time and time again how you routinely and recklessly confound the distinction between ratio decidendi and mere obiter dicta in case law, curiously enough, in favor of increasing government power in new and startling ways that would utterly destroy the entire enterprise of the Bill of Rights . . . except for leftists.

You're especially hostile to the inalienable rights of Christians; indeed, you're quite the fanatic in that regard, always imagining that the free exercise of the Christian's religion constitutes some kind of imposition on you and your ilk. You're quite unhinged, intellectually and morally. You're a bootlicking statist itchin' to get your Sieg Heil! on.

 

[G.T.]

A concept that even conservatives get wrong is that government is supposed to secure our rights. That is wrong. Government is supposed to leave our rights alone.

Although inalienable, our rights are not absolute, and are subject to reasonable restrictions by government (see, e.g., Clark v. Community for Creative Non-Violence (1984), restricting the right to freedom of assembly.)

In the United States the Constitution codifies our rights in the context of its case law, placing limits on the extent to which government may indeed restrict our rights.

It is this balance between the rights of the individual and the authority of government, both subject to the rule of law, which safeguards our civil liberties.

The Constitution clearly affords Congress powers both enumerated and implied (McCulloch v. Maryland (1819)), and the people clearly intended and authorized government to form a more perfect Union, through laws and measures enacted pursuant to the Constitution and its case law.

The issue, therefore, is not “[g]overnment is supposed to leave our rights alone,” rather, it’s the doctrine of judicial review which acknowledges the right of the people to petition the government for a redress of grievances by filing suit in Federal court and compelling government to justify its efforts to place restrictions on citizens’ civil liberties, and when the government fails to justify those restrictions, the restrictions are invalidated.

The ‘the proper role of government,' consequently, is whatever the people and the courts determine it to be, through the democratic process and elections, or through the process of judicial review in the courts, and often times and ideally, both.

The proper role of government was determined by God from the beginning. Once again, you can be counted on to make academic baby talk with no real understanding about the realities of human nature and the imperatives of liberty.

This government is teetering on the brink of fascism because of thugs like you. Any human being with an IQ above that of a gnat and a respectable sense of morality can see that. And besides, you're a liar. Every classical liberal--conservative and libertarian--on this board knows you have absolutely no respect for the construct of inalienable rights anyway. And certainly I have shown time and time again how you routinely and recklessly confound the distinction between ratio decidendi and mere obiter dicta in case law, curiously enough, in favor of increasing government power in new and startling ways that would utterly destroy the entire enterprise of the Bill of Rights . . . except for leftists.

You're especially hostile to the inalienable rights of Christians; indeed, you're quite the fanatic in that regard, always imagining that the free exercise of the Christian's religion constitutes some kind of imposition on you and your ilk. You're quite unhinged, intellectually and morally. You're a bootlicking statist itchin' to get your Sieg Heil! on.

And if God isn't real then................................

napkin

 

[M.D. Rawlings]

Although inalienable, our rights are not absolute, and are subject to reasonable restrictions by government (see, e.g., Clark v. Community for Creative Non-Violence (1984), restricting the right to freedom of assembly.)

In the United States the Constitution codifies our rights in the context of its case law, placing limits on the extent to which government may indeed restrict our rights.

It is this balance between the rights of the individual and the authority of government, both subject to the rule of law, which safeguards our civil liberties.

The Constitution clearly affords Congress powers both enumerated and implied (McCulloch v. Maryland (1819)), and the people clearly intended and authorized government to form a more perfect Union, through laws and measures enacted pursuant to the Constitution and its case law.

The issue, therefore, is not “[g]overnment is supposed to leave our rights alone,” rather, it’s the doctrine of judicial review which acknowledges the right of the people to petition the government for a redress of grievances by filing suit in Federal court and compelling government to justify its efforts to place restrictions on citizens’ civil liberties, and when the government fails to justify those restrictions, the restrictions are invalidated.

The ‘the proper role of government,' consequently, is whatever the people and the courts determine it to be, through the democratic process and elections, or through the process of judicial review in the courts, and often times and ideally, both.

The proper role of government was determined by God from the beginning. Once again, you can be counted on to make academic baby talk with no real understanding about the realities of human nature and the imperatives of liberty.

This government is teetering on the brink of fascism because of thugs like you. Any human being with an IQ above that of a gnat and a respectable sense of morality can see that. And besides, you're a liar. Every classical liberal--conservative and libertarian--on this board knows you have absolutely no respect for the construct of inalienable rights anyway. And certainly I have shown time and time again how you routinely and recklessly confound the distinction between ratio decidendi and mere obiter dicta in case law, curiously enough, in favor of increasing government power in new and startling ways that would utterly destroy the entire enterprise of the Bill of Rights . . . except for leftists.

You're especially hostile to the inalienable rights of Christians; indeed, you're quite the fanatic in that regard, always imagining that the free exercise of the Christian's religion constitutes some kind of imposition on you and your ilk. You're quite unhinged, intellectually and morally. You're a bootlicking statist itchin' to get your Sieg Heil! on.

And if God isn't real then................................

napkin

Oh, but God does exist, and only fools doubt that obvious and first fact of reality................................

judgment

 

[G.T.]

The proper role of government was determined by God from the beginning. Once again, you can be counted on to make academic baby talk with no real understanding about the realities of human nature and the imperatives of liberty.

This government is teetering on the brink of fascism because of thugs like you. Any human being with an IQ above that of a gnat and a respectable sense of morality can see that. And besides, you're a liar. Every classical liberal--conservative and libertarian--on this board knows you have absolutely no respect for the construct of inalienable rights anyway. And certainly I have shown time and time again how you routinely and recklessly confound the distinction between ratio decidendi and mere obiter dicta in case law, curiously enough, in favor of increasing government power in new and startling ways that would utterly destroy the entire enterprise of the Bill of Rights . . . except for leftists.

You're especially hostile to the inalienable rights of Christians; indeed, you're quite the fanatic in that regard, always imagining that the free exercise of the Christian's religion constitutes some kind of imposition on you and your ilk. You're quite unhinged, intellectually and morally. You're a bootlicking statist itchin' to get your Sieg Heil! on.

And if God isn't real then................................

napkin

Oh, but God does exist, and only fools doubt that obvious and first fact of reality................................

judgment

"only fools"


"judgment"


you're a real character!

 

[The Rabbi]

Real like what, a coin or a bar of gold to be bartered or sold / bought?

"Rights", residing in the philosophical, in the reasoning of humans, makes them intangible, but rights, like you recognize, are a principle that a government is duty bound to honor and conform all its operations to, thus, they certainly are real.



]

No, real is something like, oh patent laws. I can explain what patent laws are. I can show where they come from and what the parameters are.
I cannot do the same with "natural rights." It is fairies and unicorns.

Rights are everything We the People did not confer to government.

You don't examine the charter through which powers are granted to learn what rights have been excepted out of that contract.

You are merely noting now, (some 226 years late) one of the reasons that adding a bill of rights to the Constitution was so vehemently resisted and argued against as being unnecessary, dangerous and absurd, because the rights of the citizen are impossible to quantify and list.

If they are impossible to quantify and list then they effectively do not exist. Anyone can claim anything is a right and there is nothing to say it isn't.

 

[Spoonman]

While I believe in God, I have struggled with the idea that Thomas Jefferson put forth:

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.

Unalienable means (from the net): incapable of being repudiated or transferred to another.

Now, if China chooses to be communist....and forbids your rights, what difference does it make if they can't "repudiate" them (refuse to accept that they exist) ? You still don't get to exercise them....and, in effect, they have been removed.

While recently reading Ezra Taft Benson's talk on the proper role of goverment, he states that the most important function of government is to secure the rights and freedoms of individuals.

Can someone explain to me how we don't have secure rights without government ?

I just don't see it.

with out some type of governing body eatablishing boundries, you don't have rights. now that entity could be religion, it doesn't have to be government. but with out sometype of defining entity you have one governing principle - Survival of the fittest.

 

[Quantum Windbag]

Yeah but that is unproved and unprovable proposition.
What are the source for these rights?
What do they consist of?
How do we know what they are?
No one can give a credible account of these questions. Thus they do not exist.

Why is it unprovable? Can you show me one example of a government ever giving anyone life?

Huh?
What is unprovable is that such rights exist at all.

Except that life, obviously, does exist. In order for anyone to prove that such a life is not inherent in an individual you will have to demonstrate that the source of that life is in the control of an entity outside that individual. That is pretty easy if you assume that God is the source of all rights, but that still puts the source outside the control of man, society, or government.

 

[Quantum Windbag]

While I believe in God, I have struggled with the idea that Thomas Jefferson put forth:

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.

Unalienable means (from the net): incapable of being repudiated or transferred to another.

Now, if China chooses to be communist....and forbids your rights, what difference does it make if they can't "repudiate" them (refuse to accept that they exist) ? You still don't get to exercise them....and, in effect, they have been removed.

While recently reading Ezra Taft Benson's talk on the proper role of goverment, he states that the most important function of government is to secure the rights and freedoms of individuals.

Can someone explain to me how we don't have secure rights without government ?

I just don't see it.

Without government informing us what our rights might be, or not be, the only law in effect is the law of the jungle. We're animals, and if you have something I want, I might opt to simply take it, and if you resist me you do so at your peril (purely a hypothetical.) Can't imagine many like government of any stripe telling you what you can or can't do, but they do protect us well from the alternative.

As mere animals, we don't have any 'inalienable rights.' Since without a government to write them down they simply don't exist in nature. Big fish eat little fish is what it boils down to. But no fish are backing away from an easy meal out of some observance of the little fish's right to exist and be happy (and not be eaten.) Even WITH religion that right doesn't exist.

Which explains why no one ever revolted against tyranny before Locke made up natural rights.











Wait....

 

[Quantum Windbag]

Nobody seems to get this. Jefferson was describing a particular kind of rights, namely innate freedoms that are simply byproducts of our capacity for volition. He was doing this deliberately to distinguish them from privileges that must be granted, that require the service of others. In his view, we don't create government to grant us any rights we don't already have; we create it to protect those we possess naturally as thinking creatures.

An accurate understanding of this concept would go a long way toward clearing up the confusion that leads to incoherent conceptions like a "right" to health care, or other services.

Sent from my GT-P7510 using Tapatalk

If that were true, no one ever had to leave England.

One natural right people have is the right to self defense. This right exist with or without government.

If self defense is a right, so is the fear of falling. You're confusing law with the drives we're born with. Self defense is a drive, an instinct.

Self preservation isn't an instinct? Why not?

 

[Quantum Windbag]

Natural rights?

Show me one that any idiot with a gun cannot take away from YOU.

Show me one he can.

 

[Quantum Windbag]

It's better off that us humans assert these rights; however, they're not magically vested in us they are a construct of the human mind. A great one, at that.

If they are nothing but a construct of the human mind why do wild animals suffer in captivity? Why do animals fight to live?

 

[Quantum Windbag]

I don't think so. They're not self-evident in nature like apples and crickets. Should humans on Earth all cease to exist, do rights still exist? They don't exist under the scientific microscope, much like religion or concepts. They are all created and perpetuated by humans.

Are you telling me that there is absolutely no evidence of rights outside your head? How do you explain the fact that species survive better of they cooperate if there are no rights?

 

[Quantum Windbag]

No, real is something like, oh patent laws. I can explain what patent laws are. I can show where they come from and what the parameters are.
I cannot do the same with "natural rights." It is fairies and unicorns.

Rights are everything We the People did not confer to government.

You don't examine the charter through which powers are granted to learn what rights have been excepted out of that contract.

You are merely noting now, (some 226 years late) one of the reasons that adding a bill of rights to the Constitution was so vehemently resisted and argued against as being unnecessary, dangerous and absurd, because the rights of the citizen are impossible to quantify and list.

If they are impossible to quantify and list then they effectively do not exist. Anyone can claim anything is a right and there is nothing to say it isn't.

Lots of things are not quantifiable, that is not proof they are not real. For example, science has never once quantified pain, yet no one denies it exists.

Something else that is unquantifiable, but actually exist, is the ability to lead. No one can deny that some people are natural leaders. People have been trying to quantify that for as long as civilization has existed, but no one has ever managed to accomplish it.

The mere fact that we cannot measure something is not a real argument against its existence.

 

[Listening]

Nobody seems to get this. Jefferson was describing a particular kind of rights, namely innate freedoms that are simply byproducts of our capacity for volition. He was doing this deliberately to distinguish them from privileges that must be granted, that require the service of others. In his view, we don't create government to grant us any rights we don't already have; we create it to protect those we possess naturally as thinking creatures.

An accurate understanding of this concept would go a long way toward clearing up the confusion that leads to incoherent conceptions like a "right" to health care, or other services.

Sent from my GT-P7510 using Tapatalk

Please explain what we don't get.

I was asking the question in the OP....

My question, and it certainly seems to be a point of disagreement, is.....

If I have rights, but can't exercise them (i.e. if I were living in China), then do I really have them ? To say they are natural is only to demand that government not touch them (and I do agree with this position...the problem is that once a majority of people don't agree...it no longer matters....look at Obamacare) and to be prepared to revolt if they do.

If we say that rights come from God, then what is God doing to secure them ?

If God is relying on us to put the right government in place, then he is saying they are only in place as long as you care for them.

It does become something of a circular argument.

My feeling is that people need to establish, for themselves, where they believe they come from and then act accordingly.

You might say that both sides converge once the air clears, but on this I disagree. If you are a conservative, then you absolutely believe that you have to allow maximum freedoms at the proper level of government even if you don't agree with peoples choices.

 

[The Rabbi]

Why is it unprovable? Can you show me one example of a government ever giving anyone life?

Huh?
What is unprovable is that such rights exist at all.

Except that life, obviously, does exist. In order for anyone to prove that such a life is not inherent in an individual you will have to demonstrate that the source of that life is in the control of an entity outside that individual. That is pretty easy if you assume that God is the source of all rights, but that still puts the source outside the control of man, society, or government.

Life certainly exists. Life certainly is inherent in the individual. But life itself grants no rights to anyone and people have their lives taken away all the time, sometimes in the most unjust, egregious or even random manner.
God is not the source of rights. How could it be? Where are those rights communicated? How?

 

[Quantum Windbag]

Nobody seems to get this. Jefferson was describing a particular kind of rights, namely innate freedoms that are simply byproducts of our capacity for volition. He was doing this deliberately to distinguish them from privileges that must be granted, that require the service of others. In his view, we don't create government to grant us any rights we don't already have; we create it to protect those we possess naturally as thinking creatures.

An accurate understanding of this concept would go a long way toward clearing up the confusion that leads to incoherent conceptions like a "right" to health care, or other services.

Sent from my GT-P7510 using Tapatalk

Please explain what we don't get.

I was asking the question in the OP....

My question, and it certainly seems to be a point of disagreement, is.....

If I have rights, but can't exercise them (i.e. if I were living in China), then do I really have them ? To say they are natural is only to demand that government not touch them (and I do agree with this position...the problem is that once a majority of people don't agree...it no longer matters....look at Obamacare) and to be prepared to revolt if they do.

If we say that rights come from God, then what is God doing to secure them ?

If God is relying on us to put the right government in place, then he is saying they are only in place as long as you care for them.

It does become something of a circular argument.

My feeling is that people need to establish, for themselves, where they believe they come from and then act accordingly.

You might say that both sides converge once the air clears, but on this I disagree. If you are a conservative, then you absolutely believe that you have to allow maximum freedoms at the proper level of government even if you don't agree with peoples choices.

My answer, read my signature.

I will accept the rules that you feel necessary to your freedom. I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do.

When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, This you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know, the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motives. Mighty little force is needed to control a man whose mind has been hoodwinked; contrariwise, no amount of force can control a free man, a man whose mind is free. No, not the rack, not fission bombs, not anything -- you can't conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him.

 

[Quantum Windbag]

Huh?
What is unprovable is that such rights exist at all.

Except that life, obviously, does exist. In order for anyone to prove that such a life is not inherent in an individual you will have to demonstrate that the source of that life is in the control of an entity outside that individual. That is pretty easy if you assume that God is the source of all rights, but that still puts the source outside the control of man, society, or government.

Life certainly exists. Life certainly is inherent in the individual. But life itself grants no rights to anyone and people have their lives taken away all the time, sometimes in the most unjust, egregious or even random manner.
God is not the source of rights. How could it be? Where are those rights communicated? How?

The fact that everyone dies in no way changes the fact that they live. In fact, life is part of death because, without death, we would all be screwed.

 

[The Rabbi]

Except that life, obviously, does exist. In order for anyone to prove that such a life is not inherent in an individual you will have to demonstrate that the source of that life is in the control of an entity outside that individual. That is pretty easy if you assume that God is the source of all rights, but that still puts the source outside the control of man, society, or government.

Life certainly exists. Life certainly is inherent in the individual. But life itself grants no rights to anyone and people have their lives taken away all the time, sometimes in the most unjust, egregious or even random manner.
God is not the source of rights. How could it be? Where are those rights communicated? How?

The fact that everyone dies in no way changes the fact that they live. In fact, life is part of death because, without death, we would all be screwed.

Seriously? That's your answer? I'll just take that as a "I really have no idea what I mean as I never considered it before."

 

[M.D. Rawlings]

While I believe in God, I have struggled with the idea that Thomas Jefferson put forth:

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.

Unalienable means (from the net): incapable of being repudiated or transferred to another.

Now, if China chooses to be communist....and forbids your rights, what difference does it make if they can't "repudiate" them (refuse to accept that they exist) ? You still don't get to exercise them....and, in effect, they have been removed.

While recently reading Ezra Taft Benson's talk on the proper role of goverment, he states that the most important function of government is to secure the rights and freedoms of individuals.

Can someone explain to me how we don't have secure rights without government ?

I just don't see it.

Foundation.

Thomas Jefferson didn't originally put the notion of divinely endowed, inalienable rights forward. The inspired authors of the Bible did, and the Anglo-American tradition of natural law as a formal philosophical construct harks back to Augustine. It was extrapolated from the sociopolitical ramifications of Judeo-Christianity's ethical system of thought and comes down to us from Augustine through the likes of Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, Montesquieu, Sidney and the Father of Classical Liberalism John Locke. The canon of Burke's oratorical exegeses on this school of political thought is profound as well.

With regard to the founding ethos of our nation, in my opinion, the four most important works are (1) the Bible; (2) Montesquieu's The Spirit of the Laws, in which he propounds the construct of the separation of powers; (3) Sidney's Discourses Concerning Government, in which he deconstructs the despotism of monarchy and propounds the necessities of Judeo-Christian morality and the principles of republicanism; and (4) Locke's Two Treatises of Civil Government, in which he propounds, most importantly, (a) the essence of the state of nature, (b) the essence of a legitimate state of civil government, (c) the right of revolt and (d) the inalienable rights of man. As in the case of all of the aforementioned thinkers, Locke's ontological justification for his political theory are the sociopolitical imperatives of divine law as derived from biblical scripture.

In fact, Jefferson's rhetorical flourish "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" is merely a paraphrase of Locke's well-known triadic formula for natural law and the divinely endowed, inalienable rights thereof: life-liberty-private property. Pursuit of happiness was a common term of art at the time universally understood to entail the constituents and prerogatives of private property: one's own person, one's immediate family, one's material assets and one's aspirations. Further, the underlying first principles of private property are the sanctity of human life and the integrity of the biological family of nature, backed by an armed citizenry, the ultimate check against criminal elements and tyrannical political factions within the land under the terms of the social contract and against invaders from without the land of the same.

Now as for those who pooh-pooh the inherent constitution of things woven into the fabric of reality, including the fact of inalienable rights and the people's moral responsibilities thereof: make no mistake about it, societies reap what they sow. See Edmund Burke's sociopolitical extrapolation of that biblical principal in my signature below. All of the great thinkers mentioned in the above made the very same observation from scripture in sociopolitical terms, backed by the incontrovertible examples of historical experience, but Burke's is arguably the most eloquently succinct.

You see the problem with those who pooh-pooh the actuality of these principles mistakenly believe that the common substance of the material realm of being trump the imperatives that are self-evident from experience and the rational forms and logical categories of human consciousness and moral decision, and are ultimately embedded in the Being of God Himself on Whom the material realm is contingent. Hence, they fail to recognize the translation of these principles in terms of the tangible consequences of adhering to them or violating them in the material realm of being: prosperity and liberty, or poverty and tyranny, respectively.

(Actually, the few conservatives on this thread who pooh-pooh the notion that there be anything tangible about these principles routinely talk about the societal problems that arise due to leftist claptrap in their refutations of the latter. They just haven't adequately thought things through or connected the dots between the concrete reality beyond and the subordinate reality below. Or perhaps they've been dissuaded by some pseudo-intellectual blather of pure theory, for example, dblack's remark: "It's an important distinction, not because it designates some rights as sacrosanct or some similar nonsense [LOL!]. But because it puts government in the proper perspective as a tool to protect our freedom, rather than the source of that freedom."

Well, at least he got the second part right.)

God is not mocked, and He laughs at the myopic, materialistic gibberish of those who eschew that which is self-evident: the Creator, not the state, is the Source and Guarantor of human rights and dignities; hence, the latter are inalienable and, therefore, sacrosanct in every sense of the word.
___________________________


Now you're wondering how human rights can be inalienable if they are secured by government or can be suppressed by the same.

But as I've just shown, and, again, more graphically in my response below this one to Delta4Embassy's post, the essence of your query is an illusion.

First, stating that the only legitimate purpose of government is to secure the rights of man is not the same thing as stating that the government is the Source and Guarantor of the rights of man.

So that no one make the mistake of conflating these two distinct ideas, Jefferson, like Locke and Sidney before him, points out in that very same document so revered that when a government ceases to serve its only legitimate purpose: it is the inalienable right of the people, indeed, it is their duty, to rise up in revolt and put down that government. In other words, the people willingly surrender a certain portion of freedom, for the sake of brotherly love and for the sake of their mutual interests, in order to secure their inalienable rights against the constant threats posed by renegades in the state of nature.

The portion of freedom that the people willingly surrender for the sake of the collective good is not our inalienable rights as such, as the bootlicking statist Clayton Jones stupidly suggests. They are inalienable. Period. They are absolute. Period. They are sacrosanct. Period. The ramifications of the inalienable right to keep and bear arms and the inalienable right to revolt are clear.

Instead, what we give up under the rule of law, as opposed to the rule of the jungle, is the freedom to directly enforce the integrity of our inalienable rights in the face of relatively light and transient transgressions. We yield to a collective system of due process. A peaceful resolution. Note that I write relatively light and transient transgressions. The people retain the prerogative to put down egregious transgressions by the use of deadly force if necessary, and rightly so.

Lefty routinely wets his panties over that idea.

In other words, the people, not the state, bear the ultimate responsibility to secure their rights, as they retain the means to assert the ultimate check against criminal or governmental transgressions of the same. The meaning of the term secure in the political theory of natural law is promote and protect.

Second, in the real world, any given group of people systematically lose liberties in direct proportion to the rate at which its members throw off their individual responsibilities to provide for themselves and, consequently, to hold the government to its legitimate limits of power.

Bootlicking statists like Clayton Jones, for example, routinely hide their desire to oppress and steal from those with whom they disagree behind some legalistic jingoism. They lack self-control. They like being victims. That's their justification for what they know to be in their heart of hearts a violation of other people's rights and property. They are cowards and bullies. They are womanish little pricks. Oxymoron?

Clayton Jones' favorite target of oppression are orthodox Jews and Christians; his favorite legalistic weapon is a bastardized iteration of the principle of public accommodation, whereby the former are obliged to surrender their inalienable rights of free-association and private property to accommodate the illegitimate demands of others . . . inevitably backed by government under the banner of civil rights.

In fact, the depravity of hatred and envy are at the root of every tyranny, and every tyranny begets more and more dependency on the government.

Now consider this: by what means does God put down human rebellion against His inalienable rights and authority?

Once again, see my signature below.

In other words, the dynamics of natural law are tangible in terms of the realities of human interaction and the outcomes thereof. Every act of immorality or irresponsibility is another link in the chain of tyranny. Our nation is teetering on the brink of fascism because too many prefer the security of government over the responsibilities of liberty and are willing to enslave us all to pay for it.

After all, what is government security, but the amelioration of the consequences of the immorality and sloth of some hoisted onto the backs of others in the name of social justice.