Taking Rights Seriously

A privilege is something the government doles out to suit itself or calm the masses. The government gives those who meet its qualifications the privilege to vote so it can claim a form of Jeffersonian legitimacy. Jefferson argued in the Declaration that no government is morally licit without the consent of the governed.

No one alive today ratified the creation of the federal government, but most accept it. Is acceptance consent? Of course not -- no more than walking on a government sidewalk is consent to government's lies, theft and killing. Surely, the Germans who voted against the Nazis, and could not escape their filthy grasp, hardly consented to that horrible form of government.

Are our rights equal to each other? Some are equal to each other, but one is greater than all, as none of the rights catalogued briefly above can be exercised without the right to live. This is the right most challenging to governments that have enslaved masses and gloried in fighting morally illicit wars that kill and thus destroy the right to live.

But if a right is a claim against the whole world, how can a government -- whether popular or totalitarian or both -- extinguish it by death or slavery? The short answer is that no governments, notwithstanding the public oaths their officials take upon assuming office, accept the natural origins of rights. To government, rights are privileges.

Stated differently, governments do not take rights seriously.

Governments hate and fear the exercise of natural rights. Ludwig von Mises properly called government "the negation of liberty." Freedom is the default position. We are literally born free, naturally free.

Government is an artificial creation based on a monopoly of force in a geographical area that could not exist if it did not negate our freedoms. Government denies our rights by punishing the exercise of them and by stealing property from us.

Rights are not just claims against the government. They are claims against the whole world. This was best encapsulated by Rothbard's non-aggression principle, which teaches that initiating all real and threatened aggression -- whether by violence, coercion or deception -- is morally illicit. That applies to your neighbors as well as to the police.

Of course, in Rothbard's world, there would be no government police unless all persons consented; and he wouldn't have. A private police entity -- paid to protect life, liberty and property -- would be far more efficient and faithful to its job, which it would lose if it failed, than the government's police, which thrives on assaulting life, liberty and property; and keeping their jobs.

The exercise of rights requires abandonment of fear, acceptance of truth, and rejection of compromise with government. As Ayn Rand famously observed, any compromise between good and evil, natural rights and slavery, food and poison, results in death -- death of the body, death of liberty, death of both.

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To learn more about Judge Andrew Napolitano, visit https://JudgeNap.com.