 Freedom
Keys
a
collection of amusing,
fascinating,
insightful, or
maybe
even useful information |
|
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About Rights
RIGHTS are expressions of
LIBERTY,
not of privilege,
of FREEDOM, NOT of slavery.
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"A 'right' is a moral
principle defining and sanctioning a man's freedom of action in a social
context. There is only one fundamental right (all others are its
consequences or corollaries): a man's right to his own life.
"The concept of individual
rights is so new in human history that most men have not grasped it fully
to this day.
"It was the concept of
individual rights that had given birth to a free society. It was with the
destruction of individual rights that the destruction of freedom had to
begin.
"Any alleged 'right' of
one man, which necessitates the violation of the rights of another, is
not and cannot be a right.
"The term 'individual
rights' is a redundancy: there is no other kind of rights and no one else
to possess them."
--
Ayn Rand in "Man's Rights"
"Man's rights
may not be left at the unilateral decision, the arbitrary
choice, the irrationality,
the whim of another man."
-- Ayn Rand in
"The
Nature of Government"
|
"Any group or 'collective,'
large or small, is only a number of individuals. A group can have no rights
other than the rights of its individual members. In a free society, the
'rights' of any group are derived from the rights of its members through
their voluntary, individual choice and contractual agreement, and
are merely the application of these individual rights to a specific undertaking...
A group, as such, has no rights.
"Any doctrine of group
activities that does not recognize individual rights is a doctrine of mob
rule or legalized lynching... A nation that violates
the rights of its own citizens cannot claim any rights whatsoever.
In the issue of rights, as in all moral issues, there can be no double
standard."
"Individual rights are
not subject to a public vote; a majority has no right to vote away the
rights of a minority; the political function of rights is precisely to
protect minorities from oppression by majorities (and the smallest minority
on earth is the individual)."
--
Ayn Rand in "Collectivized 'Rights' "
"Man's Rights"
begins on page 108, and "Collectivized 'Rights' " on page 118 of
THIS
BOOK.
"The end does not justify
the means.
No one's rights can be
secured by the violation of the rights of others."
-- Ayn Rand, "The Cashing-In:
The Student Rebellion," Capitalism:
The Unknown Ideal
"Rights
are conditions of existence required by man's nature for his proper survival.
If man is to live on earth, it is right for him to use his mind, it is
right to act on his own free judgment, it is right to work for his values
and to keep the product of his work. If life on earth is his purpose,
he has a right to live as a rational being: nature forbids him the irrational."
-- Ayn Rand in Atlas
Shrugged
"If every person has the right to defend even by force -- his person,
his liberty, and his property, then it follows that a group of men have
the right to organize and support a common force to protect these rights
constantly. Thus the principle of collective right -- its reason for existing,
its lawfulness -- is based on individual right. And the common force that
protects this collective right cannot logically have any other purpose
or any other mission than that for which it acts as a substitute. Thus,
since an individual cannot lawfully use force against the person, liberty,
or property of another individual, then the common force -- for the same
reason -- cannot lawfully be used to destroy the person, liberty, or property
of individuals or groups."
-- Frédéric Bastiat, The
Law |
"Justice is a cardinal virtue that renders to another what rightfully
belongs to him. It is the ideal of man, the rule of conduct given to mankind.
By necessity of nature man has certain rights, or claims in justice, which
are moral and lawful to possess or obtain. These rights are antecedent
to and independent of the state, rights which the state must not violate.
In fact, the state, or civil society, is instituted to preserve these rights
to its subjects, to adjudge rights as between individuals—to render justice.
The idea of right and justice is the general basis of the legal and governmental
institutions of what is known as Western Civilization."
-- Hans
F. Sennholz
"Property is surely a right of mankind as real as liberty. The
moment the idea is admitted into society that property is not as sacred
as the laws of God, and that there is not a force of law and public justice
to protect it, anarchy and tyranny commence."
-- John Adams
"If we buy into the notion that somehow property rights are less important,
or are in conflict with, human or civil rights, we give the socialists
a freer hand to attack our property."
-- Walter
E. Williams
"A right is a claim to
freedom of action (including that of securing privacy) which is the basis
for the 'basic golden rule,' which is: 'Do nothing unto others you
wouldn't want them to do unto you,' or, as Alfred the Great put it,
"What
ye will that other men should not do to you, that do ye not to other men."
(King Alfred's Book of Laws, circa 878 AD, according to Winston
Churchill's History of the English Speaking Peoples)
"As Justice Oliver Wendell
Holmes said, 'The right to swing my fist ends where the other man's nose
begins.' Rights must apply to everyone in the same sense at the same time.
So rights must therefore be limited to claims of freedom to do anything
which does not violate the freedoms of others. This requires recognizing,
respecting and abiding by anyone else's wishes to be left alone whenever
he wants, and his wishes to be free to do anything which doesn't
violate others. This is why no one can claim a 'right' to interfere with
your life in any way without your explicit, personally-given
consent for a specified purpose. There can be no such thing as a 'right'
for anyone (or any group) to mess with you whenever he wants (or
whenever they want) since it obviously isn't applying to YOU in the same
sense at the same time.
"The purpose of a Bill
of Rights is to prevent anyone (including the majority-of-the-moment) from
violating (or even voting away the recognition of) the rights of anyone
else (including a minority of one).
"We who use the English
language are blessed with the words
'allowing' and 'permission'
to refer to a freedom of action granted by another person or persons. This
helps emphasize the clear distinction of a right as being a freedom
of action a person claims for himself.
"We who use the English
language are cursed with the word 'public' being used for both government
property and its use, as in 'public building', and for private property
and its use, as in 'open to the public.' This can let intellectually
sloppy and even intentionally dictatorial people try to get away with implying
that private property must be treated as government property, nomatter
the owners' wishes.
"Rights apply to living
beings who rely on their conscious choice- making abilities to live, as
they are an integral part of their codes of ethics -- meaning guides to
decision-making -- in cases where other decision-makers are involved. On
Earth, anyway, this obviously applies only to human beings and their interactions
with each other.
"Rights include the right
for anyone to defend himself from any force or fraud initiated by others.
"Rights
are negative in nature. My right to free speech does not override
your rights. I cannot force you to print my article in your newspaper.
The government is here to prevent anyone from interfering with my right
of free speech. Similarly, I have a right to apply for a job with
your company. I do not have a right to a job! I cannot, and
the government cannot, force you to hire me. Same for medical care,
food, clothing, etc. I have a right to look for these things, but
I cannot force you to provide them. We can't safeguard Peter's rights by
stepping on Paul's."
-- Marty
Lewinter
| "Rights do not come from governments nor their Constitutions.
They come from man's nature (and/or, if you prefer, his Creator).
Thus governments should be instituted among men to protect rights,
not
to grant them or to violate them.
"Without consistent recognition and protection of individual rights,
no civilization can last long. People's ability and willingness to simply
live in close proximity to one another, let alone their ability and willingness
to cooperate with one another, would be lost (Of course, the importance
of rights is irrelevant to anyone who lives as a hermit in permanent isolation.).
Anyone who uses even the tiniest product or benefit of civilization to
advocate even the "tiniest" violation of human rights is guilty of perpetrating
the
fallacy of the stolen concept (in this case trying to use rights to
deny rights), the inconsistency which destroys civilization, and all its
benefits, in the long run (in effect using civilization to destroy civilization)."
-- Rick Gaber |
"From the fact that people are very
different it follows that, if we treat them equally, the result must be
inequality in their actual position, and that the only way to place them
in an equal position would be to treat them differently. Equality
before the law and material equality are therefore not only different but
are in conflict with each other; and we can achieve either one or the other,
but not both at the same time." -- F. A. Hayek
"Equality, in a social sense, may be divided into that
of condition, and that of rights. Equality of condition is incompatible
with civilization, and is found only to exist in those communities that
are but slightly removed from the savage state. In practice, it can only
mean a common misery." -- James Fenimore Cooper
"Machan shines as he exposes
embarrassing contradictions of egalitarianism. Example: 'If welfare
and equality are to be primary aims of law, some people must necessarily
possess a greater power of coercion in order to force redistribution of
material goods. Political power alone should be equal among human beings;
yet, striving for other kinds of equality absolutely requires political
inequality.' " -- from Jim
Powell's Review of Private
Rights and Public Illusions by Tibor Machan
"Rights are the implementation of freedom, yet rights decide only one
issue. They decide who
gets to decide. ... [The initiation of ] force is immoral. The
use of force to achieve an objective, any objective, deprives the result
of any morality at all. It degrades and demeans both the objective
and the result.” -- Tom and Linda Rawles
"...the question becomes, are you going to have everyone play by the same
rules, or are you going to try to rectify the shortcomings, errors and
failures of the entire cosmos? Because those things are wholly incompatible.
If you're going to have people play by the same rules, that can be enforced
with a minimum amount of interference with people's freedom. But if you're
going to try to make the entire cosmos right and just, somebody has got
to have an awful lot of power to impose what they think is right on an
awful lot of other people. What we've seen, particularly in the 20th century,
is that putting that much power in anyone's hands is enormously dangerous."
--
Thomas Sowell, in an interview
in Salon11-10-99
"A free people [claim]
their rights as derived from the laws of nature, and not as the gift of
their chief magistrate." -- Thomas Jefferson: Rights of British America,
1774
"Under the law of nature, all men are born free, every one comes into the
world with a right to his own person, which includes the liberty of moving
and using it at his own will. This is what is called personal liberty,
and is given him by the Author of nature, because necessary for his own
sustenance." -- Thomas Jefferson: Legal Argument, 1770
"What is true of every member of the society, individually, is true of
them all collectively; since the rights of the whole can be no more than
the sum of the rights of the individuals." -- Thomas Jefferson to James
Madison, 1789
"It is strangely absurd to suppose that a million of human beings, collected
together, are not under the same moral laws which bind each of them separately."
-- Thomas Jefferson to George Logan, 1816
"The
majority, oppressing an individual, is guilty of a crime." --Thomas Jefferson
to Pierre Samuel Dupont de Nemours, 1816
"Individual rights are
the means of subordinating society to moral law." -- Ayn Rand
"The function of rights is to keep
society from riding roughshod over the individual. ... Individual rights
are inalienable--which means, they were not transferred to you by
anyone or any government." --
Wayne
Dunn
"The authority of government ... can have no pure right over my person
and my property but what I concede to it." -- Henry David Thoreau
"It is to
secure our rights that we resort to government at all." -- Thomas Jefferson
to Francois D'Ivernois, 1795
"Nothing... is unchangeable but the inherent and unalienable rights of
man." -- Thomas Jefferson to John Cartwright, 1824
"[Our] principles [are] founded on the immovable basis of equal right and
reason." -- Thomas Jefferson to James Sullivan, 1797
"Of liberty I would say
that, in the whole plenitude of its extent, it is unobstructed action according
to our will. But rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our
will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do
not add 'within the limits of the law,' because law is often but the tyrant's
will, and always so when it violates the right of an individual." -- Thomas
Jefferson to Isaac H. Tiffany, 1819
"Those rights, then, which
God and nature have established, and are therefore called natural rights,
such as life and liberty, need not the aid of human laws to be more effectually
invested in every man than they are; neither do they receive any additional
strength when declared by the municipal laws to be inviolate. On the contrary,
no human legislature has power to abridge or destroy them, unless the owner
shall himself commit some act that amounts to a forfeiture." -- Sir
William Blackstone,
Commentaries on the Laws of England, 1765
"A right without an attendant
responsibility is as unreal as a sheet of paper which has only one side."
– Felix Morley
"If your most basic right
is the right to life, then it seems obvious to me that you have the right
to defend your life. Guns are, in this century, the most effective means
of doing so - so effective that every
genocide has only been carried out against victims who were disarmed
by their governments." -- William G. Hartwell
"As a man is said to have
a right to his property, he may be equally said to have a property in his
rights. Where an excess of power prevails, property of no sort is
duly respected. No man is safe in his opinions, his person, his faculties,
or his possessions." -- James Madison,
National Gazzette,
1792
| To Secure Our Rights
The Founders established
a government to secure individual rights because they believed, with Locke,
that justice requires communities to recognize our moral agency. We have
a personal responsibility to run our own lives. Governments are established
among men to procure, preserve, and protect a realm in which that moral
agency may be freely exercised.
Enter the bad guys,
stage left.
Those who sought to
retain some elements of the political outlook that Locke’s theory had overthrown—namely,
the view that people are subjects of the state (in fact, belong to the
state)—found a way to expropriate and exploit the concept of human rights
to advance their reactionary position, just as they expropriated and exploited
the concept of liberalism. (Yes, Virginia, Karl Marx was a reactionary!)
Riding on purloined
prestige, they perverted the concept of individual rights at its root so
that it came to mean not liberty from others but service from others. Who
needs the right to pursue happiness when one has the right to be made happy
(even if the thus-extracted “happiness” should render the indentured providers
of it miserable)?
This was a view of
rights that wiped moral agency right out of existence. Positive rights
are thus nothing more than mislabeled preferences, or values, that people
want the government to satisfy or attain for them—by force |
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"All rights, including the right to free speech, are parts of a unified
whole—they are derivations from the fundamental right to life, and obliteration
of one of them is an eventual obliteration of them all." -- Carter
Laren
"There is no such thing as Gay Rights, Women's Rights, or Minority Rights.
The only rights that exist are Human Rights, those that apply to ALL people.
Any 'rights' that apply only to certain groups are privileges that they
are attempting to obtain by mislabeling them as rights." -- John Dobbins
| "Observe that all legitimate
rights have one thing in common: they are rights to action, not to rewards
from other people. The American
rights impose no obligations on other people, merely the negative obligation
to leave you alone. The system guarantees you the chance to work for what
you want — not to be given it without effort by somebody else. The
right to life, e.g., does not mean that your neighbors have to feed and
clothe you; it means you have the right to earn your food and clothes yourself,
if necessary by a hard struggle, and that no one can forcibly stop your
struggle for these things or steal them from you if and when you have achieved
them. In other words: you have the right to act, and to keep the results
of your actions, the products you make, to keep them or to trade them with
others, if you wish. But you have no right to the actions or products of
others, except on terms to which they voluntarily agree." |
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"The right to be let alone
is indeed the beginning of all freedom." -- Supreme Court Justice William
O. Douglas"
"They conferred,
as against the Government, the right to be let alone--the most prehensive
of rights and the right most valued by civilized men." -- Supreme Court
Justice Louis Brandeis (Olmstead v. U.S.)
"The right to be let alone
is the underlying principle of the Constitution's Bill of Rights." -- Erwin
N. Griswold
"The
authority of government ... can have no pure right over my person and my
property but what I concede to it." -- Henry David Thoreau
"A man's rights are not
violated by a private individual's refusal to deal with him." -- Ayn Rand,
The
Virtue of Selfishness
"One must be free from
persecution for one’s political views, from being arbitrarily imprisoned,
or from having one’s property seized. Such rights are crucial to human
life. Men cannot learn, make new discoveries, forge long-range plans, or
enjoy the rewards of their effort, if they live under the constant threat
of being looted, imprisoned, or murdered. ... In a truly Orwellian climax,
the [U.N.'s] Declaration brazenly upholds, as an example of man’s rights
and freedoms, the individual’s duty to serve the state." -- Robert W. Tracinski
in The
U.N.'s Distortion of Rights
"Every group is predicated
on the existence of the individual. When the individual is sacrificed,
in whole or in part, the group suffers. Protect the inalienable rights
of the smallest minority -- the lone individual -- and all minorities as
well as the majority will be protected." -- Zon
"Rights are based on moral
agency and the assumption of reciprocity. Those who choose not to
respect rights don’t get theirs respected in return ... it's classic tit
for tat. It’s like advocating tolerance for everyone but the intolerant,
or violence only toward the violent. Unconditional tolerance or nonviolence
is not sustainable, and unconditional respect for rights (for those who
disrespect them) is unilateral ethical disarmament. " -- Matt
McIntosh
"Multiculturalism is social
poison. Toleration of intolerance isn't sophistication. It's suicide."--
Jack Kelly
| "Some folk have access to better dentists
or whatever because they are richer. That may annoy someone who cannot
afford the whitest teeth, but that is not proof of unfairness, as such.
To prove it, one would have to construct an ethical theory that says that
humans have an apriori claim on their fellows to receive a certain amount
of healthcare/watever as a "right". But such "rights" are abuses of the
term: one cannot have a right to X that requires that another be forced
to provide X, such as forcing folk to train as doctors to serve the sick,
and so on [or even forcing ANYone else to pay for it -- ed.]." -- Jonathan
Pearce
"If some men are entitled by right to
the products of the work of others, it means that those others are deprived
of rights and condemned to slave labor." -- Ayn Rand
"Any
alleged 'right' of one man, which necessitates the violation of the rights
of another, is not and cannot be a right."- Ayn
Rand |
|
...
| "Human rights are
an aspect of natural law, a consequence of the way the universe works,
as solid and as real as photons or the concept of pi. The idea of
self- ownership is the equivalent of Pythagoras' theorem, of evolution
by natural selection, of general relativity, and of quantum theory.
Before humankind discovered any of these, it suffered, to varying degrees,
in misery and ignorance." -- L. Neil Smith |
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| "When
men rise above the strictly perceptual level of consciousness, the first,
or simplest, of the conceptual levels enables the concept of the Golden
Rule. Using his uniquely human capacity for concept-formation, he
can see that people can best prosper long term instead of just for a day
by engaging in specialization, trade and cooperation, and by fostering
an atmosphere of good will among all by making sure everyone treats everyone
else the same. Thus the concept of rights appears -- all based on
claims of self-ownership -- essentially as demands to be left alone until
willing to be socialized with and/or traded with. So the concept
of the Golden Rule should be obvious, as a necessity -- to men who live
as humans, that is, who use their brains, and the concepts of property
and other rights (which must, of necessity, apply to everyone in the same
sense at the same time) derive naturally from that. Further, they
recognize that their actions can help build, maintain or destroy civilization,
and they thereby develop a conscience, a sense of personal responsibility.
"At
the same time, the concept of the criminal must appear, in order to designate
those who initiate force or fraud against others, that is, violating others'
rights, whether they can grasp the concept of rights or not. Willfully
or not, criminals remain at the level of the strictly perceptual mentality,
as do animals, not thinking long term, only of what they can 'get away
with' immediately. As predators, they are dependent upon the
unwilling support of productive others, so they can't take pride in their
own productivity, self-sufficiency or personal integrity. They certainly
don't think anywhere near conceptually enough to recognize that their own
actions help build, maintain or destroy civilization. So for
controlling those who operate on such a perceptual level and who therefore
could become criminals at the first opportunity, preventive 'commandments'
as well as a system of punishments for wrongdoing may be necessary, especially
if no one has the time or the resources or even the ability to train everyone
to think conceptually and recognize rights.
"What
of ancient Greece and the slave-holding American colonies? I consider
them to be 'bridge' societies of one level of development or another, growing
out of primitivism, not yet fully civilized (Are we there yet? No,
kids, not by a long shot), but providing an environment for the further
development of civilization . Were the abolitionists right in considering
the Confederacy's slave owners to be criminals, for example? Yes,
I think so." -- Rick Gaber |
"A Bill of Rights is
what the people are entitled to against every government on Earth... and
what no just government should refuse." – Thomas Jefferson in a Letter
to James Madison, Paris, Dec. 20, 1787
''It has been objected
also against a bill of rights, that, by enumerating particular exceptions
to the grant of power, it would disparage those rights which were not placed
in that enumeration; and it might follow by implication, that those rights
which were not singled out, were intended to be assigned into the hands
of the General Government, and were consequently insecure. This is one
of the most plausible
arguments I have ever
heard against the admission of a bill of rights into this system; but,
I conceive, that it may be guarded against. I have attempted it, as gentlemen
may see by turning to the last clause of the fourth resolution [The Ninth
Amendment].''
-- James
Madison, June 8, 1789
"The enumeration in the Constitution,
of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained
by the people." -- Amendment IX, Constitution of the United
States
A
Poem
Lost
Rights
Bill
of Rights
Bogus
Rights
Bill
of
NO
Rights
Chodorov
on Rights
IndividualRights.org
Some
Crucial
Definitions
Rights
are moral principles
Individuals
and Their Rights
A
"Right" to Health Care ?
The
U.N.'s Distortion of Rights
The U.N.
versus
Individual Rights
The
Destruction of the Bill of Rights
"The
Planetary Bill of Rights Project"
Russell
Madden Takes on the Rat Freaks
Stop
calling things "civil rights" when they're not.
Individual
Rights (& Personal Responsibility) Home Page
"Over himself, over his
own mind and body, the individual is sovereign." -- J.S. Mill, On
Liberty, 1859, "Introductory"
"...every man has a property
in his own person. This nobody has any right to but himself." -- John Locke
"From all which it is
evident, that though the things of Nature are given in common, man (by
being master of himself, and proprietor of his own person, and the actions
or labour of it) had still in himself the great foundation of property;
and that which made up the great part of what he applied to the support
or comfort of his being, when invention and arts had improved the conveniences
of life, was perfectly his own, and did not belong in common to others."
-- John Locke
"The highest manifestation
of life consists in this: that a being governs its own actions. A
thing which is always subject to the direction of another is somewhat of
a dead thing." -- Saint Thomas Aquinas (who re-introduced Aristotle to
Western Civilization, eventually leading to the Renaissance)
"[Art.] 2. [Natural Rights.]
All men have certain natural, essential, and inherent rights - among which
are, the enjoying and defending life and liberty; acquiring, possessing,
and protecting, property; and, in a word, of seeking and obtaining happiness.
Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by this
state on account of race, creed, color, sex or national origin." -- New
Hampshire State Constitution, 1784
"In a new draft article,
'St.
George Tucker’s Second Amendment: Deconstructing 'The True Palladium of
Liberty' [pdf],'
Stephen P. Halbrook takes the reader step-by-step through Tucker's monumentally
influential annotated American Blackstone, the most important legal
treatise of the Early Republic. Analyzing Tucker's Blackstone, and other
writings by Tucker, Halbrook shows that Tucker explicitly recognized the
Second Amendment as an individual right, including the right to posses
firearms for personal self-defense, unrelated to militia duty." -- David
Kopel
Some
More Quotations about Rights ... And
...
More
Articles on Rights
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