Rights
Rights: one of the most abused words in the language.
From early in our lives, we’re fed a line about “rights,” that is intended to deprive us of those rights.
And it looks like the worst thing to do is a general search on the internet, especially Quora or Reddit, which feature a wide assortment of the usual blathering halfwits, misfits, nerds, spergs and fools that don’t know what they’re talking about. The gist of most of their blather involves conflating rights with government and entitlements. In fact, bots and A.I. seem actually better informed than the average jabberer’s muddled interpretation.
For some, there are “rights” to receive free health care, education, to be given a job, even food and a house! In other words, entitlements and privileges. For a huge number, “rights” is a sort of blanket word that means, “What feels good to me at the time.”
Purists believe that you have the right to your own life, liberty and property. But that’s the end of it, and no one has the right to take something from another person, even if it’s called “charity” or “taxes.”
The purist sees the idea of entitlements as “robbing Peter to pay Paul,” a form of theft.
A most significant quality of rights is that they cannot be granted or taken away. Someone can only infringe on your rights. However, it’s a principle that as a punishment for crime, society is empowered to deprive someone of freedom and certain rights, for a given period, a logical consequence if that person violates the rights of another.
We’ve discussed the flaw possessed by most of mankind. As soon as people get together, they will try to find ways to justify infringements upon the rights/lives of other people. Partly, this is a training issue. We need to learn to look for solutions that never violate anyone’s rights. We’ve already looked at one example of that, in our discussion of cell phone use while driving. Were judges empowered to use that as a consideration in sentencing and the determination of guilt in a traffic case, it would mean we needn’t “ban” cell phone use by drivers, they’d pick up on the lesson soon enough.
Freedom
Freedom is the state or quality of being at liberty, unconstrained.
Freedom is, ideally, the ability to do whatever you want, provided you are not interfering with the life, liberty or property of another.
This “freedom” business hasn’t worked out. Who’d-a thunk that people were going to fight against us on this issue of freedom?
If “freedom” to one person is different from “freedom” to another person, there can be no meeting of the minds.
You’d think people’s sentiments would be pretty well-honed when it comes to fundamental freedom, but no.
Freedom seems a hard thing.
As a simple tool to clarify how to think about and identify freedom, imagine you were dropped on an uninhabited desert island. That’s the perspective from which to begin your examination and consideration as to what “freedom” is.
As for your rights, freedom to various actions, stranded on the desert island, it’s obvious that there are no “rights” to any freebies from government. And that’s a good question to ask at all times, to ground oneself. “What rights do I have, stranded alone on a desert island?”
Now, if another person arrives on the island, you still have the same rights, with the qualification that now you must have consideration for the rights of the other. Not a difficult concept to grasp, except by people who see an advantage for themselves in playing dumb.
Things get quite complicated with “rights” when we are in a society, interacting with large populations, but an effortless way to recognize our general rights is to look at what others expect in their dealings, or, even better, how the most privileged in society expect to be treated.
Spectrum of Beliefs
This whole “rights” issue is full of contention and it seems to get worse every day. It’s both disingenuousness – people pretending not to understand the concept – and ignorance, that fuels an ongoing battle between liberty-seeking and collectivist mindsets, a foolish, almost hopeless struggle, because no one is going to convince collectivists, many of whom are a little too dim to understand actual freedom and rights. Then there are also many who know that collectivism is self-defeating and thievery, but want their easy piece of the pie.
Liberals conflate rights with “getting a bunch of stuff,” which conflicts with the idea of freedom, since someone has to give up time, labor, and/or possessions to give free stuff to someone else. “Free stuff” doesn’t fall out of the sky.
Rights don’t “add up” like poker chips or money. And, rights can’t be transferred or accrued.
That is, two people don’t have “twice the rights” of one person. So no majority has the right to rule the minority, any more than “might makes right” is a moral standard (though it is a de-facto standard, in far too many cases).
But why not? What about “the greater good?”
The answer is that there is no “greater good,” that is abstract nonsense that can justify any outrage, there are only weasels trying to get their own way, and exploit others.
To put it yet another way, if someone has more “rights” than you, you have no rights. But since “rights” are a universal principle, if you have no rights, no one has any rights.
Logical Disconnect
We have progressed beyond the idea of kings as demigods, and our reliable experience is that no man has special powers or abilities that put him above all other men. Therefore, it is axiomatic, a given, that “all men are equal under the law.”
Is it really necessary to emphasize that this isn’t an assertion that “all men are equal?”
No one man or group of men has authority to rule others, because rights are not additive.
Perhaps this is not generally understood because it isn’t clearly explained to people.
For example, we know that two men can’t lawfully team up to beat up one innocent man because they have “twice as much rights.”
Yet we allow government to dictate to, and even kill, others.
There’s a logical disconnect.
Since rights are not additive, a group, even a group as large as “government,” has no inherent rights, certainly not some weird “sum of rights,” that is so often implicitly associated with government. In fact, abstracts have no rights. A corporation, an organization, a government. Any so-called “rights” they have, are privileges granted to the administrators of those groups.
What is the legitimate purpose of government, then? It’s to protect the rights of everyone under its jurisdiction.
Confused “Rights”
In general, no one is going to go along with evil if someone tells him it’s evil. But we’ll go along with evil if someone tells us it’s good.
It doesn’t help that the understanding of what is righteous is tainted. For example, in the movie, The Corporation, an East Indian woman complains about an absurd prohibition against farmers saving their seeds for the next planting season.
She stridently asserts, “A law prohibiting saving seeds is not a law worth following.”
It almost makes you despair. Sure, she doesn’t know any better, but she is being quoted because she is ignorant, pushing another subtle propaganda.
All law, by definition, is “worth following,” and we must follow it, in fact.
But a general law prohibiting the saving of seeds, is not and cannot be a law, any more than the government can pass a law regulating things to fall upwards, instead of downwards, because that would be more convenient, and things wouldn’t break on the floor so much.
Provided farmers simply bought the seed, without any agreed-on conditions, the seeds and whatever grew from those seeds were then their property, to do with as they pleased. Yet the Indian woman was still wrong in her argument, and it is important that we get our facts and arguments straight, or it leads to trouble.
What would a courtroom judge say to this woman?
“So you just want to follow the laws that you like, then?”
It’s a devastating rebuttal.
These fine details are important because if you don’t get your reasoning straight, Monsanto (now Bayer) can come in with a snappy response by saying the seed-saving is violating its rights. It might say, “Well, you’re violating our right to profits.” Of course there is no right to profits, but stupid arguments are often as good or better than valid arguments in courts.
No one, least of all an artificial corporation, has a “right” to have people give it money or buy its product.
The seed woman’s correct argument should be, “Restricting the right to save the seeds resulting from the plants the farmer purchased and grew, his property, is not and cannot be a law. It would infringe on the farmer’s property right.”
Monsanto could, of course, have made a valid contract with the farmer to not save seed, perhaps with the inducement of a discount on the sale of the seed.
(As an aside, an honest and competent system would have recognized the evil of Monsanto, with its initiative to clandestinely destroy all “heritage” seed – seed that can be used, season after season – and replace it with its own, patented, terminator seed that produces sterile offspring. That decent government would then pull Monsanto’s corporate status, ending it then and there.)
Contract and Law
So that’s how you can make your own law: by entering into a contract. If the farmer and Monsanto have a valid contract, whereby the farmer is bound to not save seed, then Monsanto would have a legitimate cause of action. Of course, this law is applicable only between the parties to the contract.
And law isn’t caught flat-footed in an honest and competent system; it already has an answer to the Monsantos and others that would pull shenanigans like an attempt to monopolize the food supply, in that an illegal or unlawful contract is unenforceable.
Clarification
If government “passes a ‘law,’” it’s not government, but a sham organization. A slave master.
As we’ve discussed before, laws are not created, but discovered. Government passes legalisms that it calls laws. Generally, these legalisms are a flex by the government, an expression of its power, usually as a convenience or to press some advantage for the lackeys of government. As you know, these spurious “laws” are being overturned or modified all the time, something not possible with a genuine “law.”
Women’s Rights and All the Other Contrived Rights
Designer rights are a despicable ruse. There are no such things. Rights are universal, not a political convenience or whim, and apply to everyone.
More Confusion
A cringeworthy YouTube video features a protester arguing with a police officer in London, England.
The protester was arguing about how he was asserting his right to protest, and the cop copsplained, that he, the cop, was just asserting his own right to interfere with the protester, which stymied that protester. Ideally, the protester would respond that the cop had no such right. The cop’s rights as a citizen stopped the moment he swore an oath of office. That vow is to uphold the citizens’ rights, therefore necessarily subsuming his personal rights while on the job.
Government Gone Wrong
There are telltales when a government has gone wrong, and stops doing what it was intended to do, uphold people’s rights.
When General Morons went out of business, the government gave it tax money to restructure and reemerge as a “new” GM.
The bailout of GM was a show of illegitimate government force, to keep cronies in power at the automaker, and a payoff of political supporters. It robbed taxpayer funds, and was “generally unprincipled,” as one writer put it. A valuable lesson to the public that the actors of government should have been run out of office.
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