Rights?

Written By Brandon William Woodward

Draft Status: Rough

Modern America is rife with people speaking about their rights and often how those rights are being stepped on. It's important to understand what a right is.

I hate quoting definitions but I believe it's important here. "A right is an inherent, inalienable entitlement that every person possesses simply by virtue of being human." If that's what a right is, I believe that we really don't have that many. If you're in the wilderness and encounter another person, good luck convincing him not to kill you and steal your food based on that it's your right as a human to keep your food and continue peacably on your way. You'd better have a gun or at least an enforceable law to back you up. The definition doesn't account for different countries or time periods. Rights vary widely around world and through history. So let's expand this a bit. How about, #1: a right is what you can take or defend for yourself. This is overridden by #2: a right is something guaranteed to you in the social contract of which you are a part.

Let's examine #1. If you claim to have property rights and you can bludgeon to death anyone who steps on your land. Congratulations, you just granted yourself property rights. If you want to have an abortion and shoot anyone who tries to stop you, well done, you now have the right to an abortion.

#2 gets a bit more complicated. Property rights are inherent to a stable society. The phrase "possession is 9/10th's of the law" has roots in early Roman society. A society has to say, "if you own something, it's yours and can't be taken from you." Without this, the baddest guy on the block would just take all the possessions and women of all of the weaker guys. This type of society would quickly break down and cease to exist. So any decent social contract has to have property rights. The big exception here is that the government...aka the baddest guy on the block, can come and take small amounts from you periodically in the form of taxation. We reluctantly agree to this because they protect us from all the other baddies out there. This is exactly how "protection" works in the mafia. Hey there, give me some money every week, and I'll make sure those criminals out there don't come and steal from you.

Where do we go from here? What other rights are people in a society guaranteed? All of a sudden we have to fall back to #1. The society at large has to demand any right and be willing to take or defend it, from both each other and the government. This is the best and most useful case to having an armed populace. Without that the population has very little retribution when rights that they believe are deserved are stepped on or not granted. We have the ability to request, plead, and vote for the things we want. But that is limited. If the politicians we vote for refuse to make and pass laws granting the rights we desire, we continue to impotently whine about the rights we'd appreciate if they granted us. It's when we're willing to do something more about it that change occurs and rights are granted and/or protected.

Where we as Americans are unique is that we have in our blood much more of #1 point i make up top, than the majority of the world. In most of the world, there are 1000s of years of conformity built in. You can see this clearly in Europe. Europeans are generationlly trained to serve their feudal masters who in turn serve their all-powerful kings. Rights were earned slowly and incompletely after the American Revolution showed it was possible. They have nowhere near the free speech rights that we are afforded by the First Amendment. Americans, on the other hand, are just a few generations removed from pilgrims, settlers, and cowboys. These people had very tenuous social contracts and had to fall back on #1 to guarantee they had any rights at all, including to life itself.