You Gotta Fight For The Right

The theme for today's article is your rights. The rights which are as important a part of you as your breath and your life. The rights which were not granted to you, or given to you, but belong to you by natural right. The rights which you possess as a free individual. The rights the government would like to deny you. The rights they claim you don't possess.

In order for you to understand what rights you possess, you first have to understand what rights are. They aren't granted to you. Those are privileges. They aren't allowed to you. Those are permissions. They are an inherent aspect of your very existence. You do not need to appeal to the state for them. You don't need to abase yourself to some assumed authority. You simply own your rights.

For instance, you have the right to defend yourself. You have the right to freedom of locomotion. You have the right to freedom of expression. You have the right to do what you wish with you life, your labors, and your private property.

Yet the state believes that they can abrogate those rights. They believe that they can decide what you can and cannot do with your life. At its root, this is based in the belief that they own you. It isn't enough for them that you don't hurt others. It isn't enough for them that you don't lie, or cheat, or steal, or rape, or murder. You aren't to be allowed to make decisions about your own life either.

We all know that the government believes that they have the right to prevent you from engaging in consensual sex as part of a mutually agreed upon commercial arrangement. They won't let you imbibe recreational drugs of your choice purchased without threat or fraud. They won't let people engage in private intimacy or pursue loving commitments if they are of the wrong gender. They won't allow you the freedom to disassemble, or to be offended, or to object to their demands.

Under the current system, the rights of all people are decided solely not by the will of the majority, but by the will of those politicians elected by the majority. Even when their actions go against the will of the majority, they simply revert to protestations of their access to special knowledge which justifies those actions. And of course, by its very nature, that special knowledge is unknowable to the people.

Think of how often they tell you that they are making decisions about war based on intelligence they can't share with you. Or how often they are making decisions about the economy based on a “big picture” you can't see. Or how often they act on an international scale based on policy you don't have access to. They claim that this is a representative republic, yet how can you pick people to represent you based on information you don't have that they won't share?

So they allege that companies do not have the right to vie for their own customers with incentives and bonuses, all in the name of “competition.” And they allege that private establishments aren't allowed to set their own rules as to the use of completely legal substances on their property, in the name of the “rights” of their voluntary customers and employees to fresh air. And they allege that the private citizens must relinquish the use of the analog frequencies to the government for their own financial gain, of course, they want to pretend that it's for your own good, after all, you'll get better picture quality. But you weren't given the option were you? You didn't ask for this, and if you did, other people aren't allowed to opt out.

So ultimately, they decide what privileges to allow you to have. And there's nothing you can do. Because they decide whether you have the right to protest. Whether you have the right to defend yourself. Whether you even have the right to own the means of protest and defense. After all, those aren't really rights anyway.

Not when you only have them at their indulgence.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarcho_capitalism