Are there any human rights?

Actually, no.

Preliminary thoughts:

Let’s start with the most famous (and valuable) declaration of Rights ever written.

“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.”

Two things stand out immediately. Our unalienable Rights are things that no one else has to provide for us and they have to be secured, that is they can be trampled upon or taken away by other men. To reiterate: A true Right cannot be given to you and a true Right can only be taken away.

Before we continue with our discussion of Rights we must state an obvious fact too often overlooked. The world has always been, is currently and will always be governed by the aggressive use of force. Might does not necessarily make right but it does determine what actually transpires in the affairs of men.

Whatever natural law I may declare or whatever natural rights I may name for myself or others depends wholly upon my ability to enforce said rights either as an individual or as a member of a group who shares my values and can prevent others from taking them away.

Not to put too fine a point on it but the only person who is guaranteed the above natural rights is a person living completely alone on a desert island as in Cast Away. And even he had to provide for his own life by fishing, his own liberty by not injuring himself, and his own shelter from sun, wind and rain. It’s also worth noting that Tom Hanks could NOT provide his own happiness as he was in fact quite miserable without human company.

Someone once said, “It is not good for the man to be alone.” The truth of this is evidenced by the use of solitary confinement to punish men. People who need people are the luckiest people in the world some might say. Regardless, like it not, we need other people for just about everything. Yet other people are also the cause of all of our most intractable problems.

Let us consider the right to the land I or my ancestors happen to occupy at present. No one has any inherent right to any piece of land anywhere. There are no “original” inhabitants. There are only the people who currently occupy the land they took from some other previous inhabitants who have now either died out or been killed off or been assimilated or forced to move on.

No indigenous Americans are the original inhabits of any part of the Americas. They are simply the ones who were there when Europeans arrived. They in turn drove out or enslaved or interbred with whomever was previously there going back for thousands of years.

Those with the power to maintain their ownership of a land will continue to live there until someone with greater power takes it from them. Now the Christianized West, after its colonial period, has generally agreed to respect the boundaries of other nation states. United States has the power to take away the sovereignty of both Canada and Mexico and to subsume them under our governance. We are the only world power who chooses not to invade or destroy its neighbors independence even though we have the power to do so. All other countries on earth, without this Judeo-Christian worldview, would greedily conquer their neighbors if they had the power to do so.

As another example consider the so-called rights of women. Women have no more power to acquire and demand rights than whatever men are willing to give them. In most of the nonChristian world, that is the world of Islam, communism, dictatorships, etc., women have no particular rights to anything. Beautiful women can attach themselves to powerful men and be granted certain freedoms in exchange for their love and affection or at least their submission to those men.

The only thing that allows me and mine to live freely under any law is that either by my own physical strength, or the weapons I own, or the body guards I employ, or the constable I elect or ultimately the military we maintain through our collective taxes is there any ability to enforce the law and to prevent someone else from taking any given right from me or my neighbor.

So far, in the Twenty First century, all of the free world lives so only under the economic and military might of America and her likeminded allies. Should the West lose a war with the East (i.e., communist China, or a militant Hindu India, or a militant Islamic state, or a reinvigorated Japan, or communist Russia, or anyone else in the world) we will lose any imagined rights we might maintain that we have. Ultimately no one has any rights to anything that they cannot keep by force.

So when we debate among ourselves about human or natural rights we assume sufficient power to enforce those rights already exists for without such power or strength of arms our rights are only those our oppressors allow us to have. “You are kept alive to serve this ship.”

The second point to understand is a shared worldview. People can only live peaceably with other people who generally share the same worldview. If one people believe the ultimate reality is God and another people believe the ultimate reality is nature then our view of rights can and will differ significantly. Even if a people believe in God their understanding of that God (i.e., as in Christianity vs Islam) can and will create significant differences in what they consider to be God-given or natural rights.

So when Thomas Jefferson pens in the Declaration of Independence, “We find these truths to be self-evident …”, these truths were largely not self-evident then nor are they necessarily self-evident now.

Definition of a Right

Now that we see that there are no rights whatsoever beyond my ability, individually or corporately, to successfully use force to maintain said rights let’s move toward a proper definition of what actually exists in the real world.

There are manmade and there are natural rights. A manmade right is anything that needs to be enforced upon others to serve me. A natural right is anything that occurs without the input of another person.

Leftist-democrats or Progressives have declared all manner of rights. The right to food, employment, housing, medical care, an education, entertainment, a vacation, a paid retirement and a living wage. What we immediately see is that if you lived on a desert island, such as Tom Hanks in Cast Away, none of these so-called rights exist at all.

And why is that? Because they all need to be provided by conscripting another person’s labor to provide them. They do not occur naturally. Even if two or three persons were stranded on a desert island we can readily see that none of these rights would exist. Even if all three agreed to work together to provide for food or shelter everything else on that list would still be missing and whatever anyone person obtained in the way of food or shelter would largely depend upon his own and that of the others’ skill and industry which might very well be sorely lacking.

What we would also discover on our hypothetical desert island is that the only rights we could actually expect from the other two is the right to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. Why? Because these do not require the labor of the other two to provide. By nature you have life and liberty and the ability, not to be happy or even achieve happiness, but rather to pursue it. If you pursue happiness at the expense of another there is sure to be conflict. If you purse happiness with the voluntary cooperation of another you may have peace but you still may not obtain happiness nor any tangible good.

Now that we see there is no universal agreement on what people call a right I want to further limit what can be called a right.

WHAT IS A RIGHT?

Fatal Blindness (FR archives) 06/14/99 – Fulton Huxtable – for Free Republic

Posted on August 31, 2003 11:27:09 AM CDT by NMC EXP

A right is the sovereignty to act without the permission of others. The concept of a right carries with it an implicit, unstated footnote: you may exercise your rights as long as you do not violate the same rights of another—within this context, rights are an absolute.

A right is universal—meaning: it applies to all men, not just to a few. There is no such thing as a “right” for one man, or a group of men, that is not possessed by all. This means there are no special “rights” unique to women or men, blacks or white, the elderly or the young, homosexuals or heterosexuals, the rich or the poor, doctors or patients or any other group.

A right must be exercised through your own initiative and action. It is not a claim on others. A right is not actualized and implemented by the actions of others. This means you do not have the right to the time in another person’s life. You do not have a right to other people’s money. You do not have the right to another person’s property. If you wish to acquire some money from another person, you must earn it—then you have a right to it. If you wish to gain some benefit from the time of another person’s life, you must gain it through the voluntary cooperation of that individual—not through coercion. If you wish to possess some item of property of another individual, you must buy it on terms acceptable to the owner—not gain it through theft.

Alone in a wilderness, the concept of a right would never occur to you, even though in such isolation you have the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. In this solitude, you would be free to take the actions needed to sustain your life: hunt for food, grow crops, build a shelter and so on. If a hundred new settlers suddenly arrive in your area and establish a community, you do not gain any additional rights by living in such a society nor do you lose any; you simply retain the same rights you possessed when you were alone.

A right defines what you may do without the permission of those other men and it erects a moral and legal barrier across which they may not cross. It is your protection against those who attempt to forcibly take some of your life’s time, your money or property.

Animals do not have rights. Rights only apply to beings capable of thought, capable of defining rights and creating an organized means—government—of protecting such rights. Thus, a fly or mosquito does not possess rights of any kind, including the right to life. You may swat a fly or mosquito, killing them both. You do not have the right to do the same to another human being, except in self-defense. You may own and raise cows, keep them in captivity and milk them for all they are worth. You do not have the right to do the same to other men, although that is what statists effectively do to you.

There is only one, fundamental right, the right to life—which is: the sovereignty to follow your own judgment, without anyone’s permission, about the actions in your life. All other rights are applications of this right to specific contexts, such as property and freedom of speech.

The right to property is the right to take the action needed to create and/or earn the material means needed for living. Once you have earned it, then that particular property is yours—which means: you have the right to control the use and disposal of that property. It may not be taken from you or used by others without your permission.

Freedom of speech is the right to say anything you wish, using any medium of communication you can afford. It is not the responsibility of others to pay for some means of expression or to provide you with a platform on which to speak. If a newspaper or television station refuses to allow you to express your views utilizing their property, your right to freedom of speech has not been violated and this is not censorship. Censorship is a concept that only applies to government action, the action of forcibly forbidding and/or punishing the expression of certain ideas.

Statists have corrupted the actual meaning of a right and have converted it, in the minds of most, into its opposite: into a claim on the life of another. With the growth of statism, over the past few decades, we have seen an explosion of these “rights”—which, in fact, have gradually eroded your actual right to your life, money and property.

Statists declare you have a “right” to housing, to a job, to health care, to an education, to a minimum wage, to preferential treatment if you are a minority and so on. These “rights” are all a claim, a lien, on your life and the lives of others. These “rights” impose a form of involuntary servitude on you and others. These “rights” force you to pay for someone’s housing, their health care, their education, for training for a job—and, it forces others to provide special treatment for certain groups and to pay higher-than-necessary wages.

Under statism, “rights” are a means of enslavement: it places a mortgage on your life—and statists are the mortgage holders, on the receiving end of unearned payments forcibly extracted from your life and your earnings. You do not have a right to your life, others do. Others do not have a right to their lives, either, but you have a “right” to theirs. Such a concept of “rights” forcibly hog-ties everyone to everyone else, making everyone a slave to everyone else—except for those masters, statist politicians, who pull the strings and crack the whips.

Actual rights—those actions to which you are entitled by your nature as man—give you clear title to your life. A right is your declaration of independence. A statist “right” is their declaration of your dependence on others and other’s dependence on you. Until these bogus “rights” are repudiated, your freedom to live your life as you see fit will continue to slowly disappear.

==================================

Written By : John Hawkins

May 13, 2011

With regard to the idea of whether you have a right to healthcare, you have to realize what that implies. It’s not an abstraction. I’m a physician. That means you have a right to come to my house and conscript me. It means you believe in slavery. It means that you’re going to enslave not only me, but the janitor at my hospital, the person who cleans my office, the assistants who work in my office, the nurses. (There is) an implied use of force. If I’m a physician in your community and you say you have a right to healthcare, you have a right to beat down my door with the police, escort me away and force me to take care of you? That’s ultimately what the right to free healthcare would be. — Rand Paul 

How dare Rand Paul compare the government giving people the right to force other people to unwillingly labor for free to slavery….oh, wait.

If you have a “right” to healthcare, then why not a “right” to an education, food, housing, clothing, and a great job? Liberals would certainly be fine with that. That’s because liberals love the idea of declaring that people have an almost unlimited number of “rights.” Why? Because it takes us farther away from capitalism towards socialism, from freedom towards government control, and from independence to dependence.

As a society, we may choose to provide people in need with healthcare, education, food, housing, and clothing because we’re compassionate people. But, there’s a world of moral, legal, and logical differences between our choice to do that and declaring it to be a “right.” A right implies that whether you like it or not, whether you’re compensated or not, you have no choice other than to provide another human being with goods and services.

Calling it a “right” instead of slavery may make it sound better, but it doesn’t make it okay.

PS: I’ve heard some people say that Paul’s analogy is off because the Constitution says people “enjoy the right” to have “the assistance of counsel.” Those people are incorrect. That’s a requirement placed on the government by the Founding Fathers. In other words, if the government wants to put someone on trial, it has to make sure that person can afford a lawyer or has one provided for him. So, either the government pays a lawyer to help an indigent client or there’s no trial.

Put another way, the Founding Fathers were protecting the people from the government’s power. On the other hand what liberals want to do is give the government more power over the people. That’s why one could fairly be called a right and the other could fairly be compared to slavery.

================================================