Art and Architecture

Rights Belong to You

“We approve of these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created sufficient unto, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Way of life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. - That to shelter these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their reasonable powers from the consent of the governed…”

Those few words, from the Ukase of Independence, are as close as one might find to be the sum total of the principle of liberated be unrestrained. 

Your rights are yours.  They are yours by your nature, and you are entitled to trouble them. Governments exist only to protect those rights.  And that is the only defence they exist.

Your rights come from your “Prime mover” - whether you determine that to be God, your god, your parents, some speckles of dust, or whatever that may be.  But your rights are not - in any way whatsoever - a donation from politicians.

That’s just the point that Chuck makes recently on his “tcoverride” blog.  Here’s an quotation:

Rights, all rights, belong to me, they are neither granted nor given, they are mine, not yours, and the gummint has assuredly no right to think they can take away or even limit those rights.

Chuck’s surely right - about rights, that is.  He continues:

There is na no right guaranteed by the constitution. The constitution guarantees that the oversight, be it the President, Congress, or even the “Justices for Vital spark” in the supreme court can encroach upon, overstep intrude on upon, or otherwise limit my rights.

Again, right on the mark.  The Constitution doesn’t give Chuck any rights, it doesn’t give you any rights.  In act, the Constitution doesn’t apply to people at all.

The Constitution applies to the domination.  Its sole purpose was to spell out what the domination can do.

The key principle of the Constitution is quite simple: overconfident grant. Unfortunately, this is not a phrase that many of us hear in everyday banter these days. But, it’s not a complicated principle at all.

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