Rights, Entitlements, Privileges, and Duties
Published Sat, Feb 6 2010 2:23 PM
The last time I wrote on the topic of our individual rights as guaranteed (sorry, the original article no longer exists) – but not granted – by the United States Constitution, I made a distinction between our individual, unalienable rights and what so many people these days perceive to be our “rights”. To begin with our true rights are given to us, as individuals, by God. They are not granted to us by governments. They are not granted to us based upon our membership in a given social class, and they are given to us ALL equally. It is this self evident truth upon which our entire government in these united States is based.
I say it is a self evident truth. Our founders also declared it to be self evident, using that fact as supporting evidence when Thomas Jefferson penned the Declaration of Independence, which was the UNANIMOUS declaration of our founders. John Locke demonstrated that our indefeasible, unalienable rights derive from the law of Nature and that all men in the state of nature hold these rights. Rene Descartes demonstrated from first principles that God must exist and that He is the One who made us. These are all simple but profound truths, and they are under attack all the time by the enemies of Liberty and even by her defenders who don’t take the time to consider them carefully.
Let’s begin with the premise that our rights are given to us by God. To use a phrase that one of my high school teachers used oh so many years ago, it should be intuitively obvious to even the most casual observer that this notion is under attack. We see it in the mishandling and misinterpretation of the first amendment to the Constitution. We see it in the constant attempts by organizations like the misleadingly named American Civil Liberties Union (an organization that was originally founded by a Communist seeking to subvert the United States from within) and the Freedom From Religion foundation to drive every mention of God from the public square.
Why the attacks on God and on religion? As a Christian I believe that there is a continual battle going on between God and those angels that fell away from him in antiquity, and part of that battle is over the souls of men. The devil would enjoy nothing more than a purely secular society that refuses to acknowledge God’s existence. So it is that I believe that he works against any mention of God in the public square or acknowledgement of God anywhere.
However there is a more mundane reason why there are so many attacks on God and religion, particularly Christianity, than the battle between powers and principalities in the heavens. If the people can be persuaded that God does not exist or that he takes no interest in our civil society then it is much easier to persuade them that our individual rights do not come to us from God and are not inherent in our nature but rather are nothing more than privileges granted to us by our government. And what government gives us, government may also take away with impunity. And so it is that one of the pillars upon which our nation was founded is toppled (or at least the attempt to topple it is made) by the statists.
And why would the statists want that? Well, the notion of individual, unalienable rights is antithetical to the statist’s notion of class-based “rights”. A free people living in liberty and pursuing their own aims have no real need of a powerful centralized state that controls their lives in exchange for entitlements. They are quite capable of making up their own minds what actions will best suit their own interests. A self-reliant people asserting and exercising their individual rights will naturally distrust a powerful centralized government that seeks to regulate their exercise of those rights “for the good of the society” rather than securing them against depredation.
That’s why we have a whole new class of “rights” these days, “class rights” or the rights of society as opposed to the rights of the individual. It’s also why we see so many entitlement programs. And I have to tell you it’s bad for our society in so many ways there’s not enough room for me to really elaborate in this short article. Remember, I said last time that the important distinction between our individual, unalienable rights and these entitlements has to do with their character. Our individual rights declare what we MAY do as INDIVIDUALS. The “rights” that our politicians and the statists would have us believe in work instead to tell us what we may REQUIRE OTHERS to do FOR US. They are the rights of classes of people rather than the rights of individuals. They sap at our character and enslave us rather than liberate us.
THE FUNDAMENTAL DIFFERENCE BETWEEN OUR GOD GIVEN RIGHTS AND OUR GOVERNMENT PROVIDED ENTITLEMENTS IS A SIMPLE ONE. Our God given rights ensure our freedom to live our lives as He would have us do so – Our government provided entitlements enslave us and make us dependent on government rather than God and ourselves. This is why the statist seeks to limit our enjoyment of the former and enlarge the latter – until we are all the slaves of the state at which point the state must begin rationing those entitlements in order to survive.
Health care is a perfect example. From the point of view of the conservative we have a right to seek quality health care in order to preserve our lives and in the pursuit of happiness. From the point of view of the statist we have a “right” or more accurately an “entitlement” to health care – making the health care provider a slave to our needs and ensuring that as time passes the quality of our health care and the amount of it we may receive will eventually be rationed by the state.
But what of privileges and duties? The title of this article mentions Rights, Entitlements, PRIVILEGES, and DUTIES. it is with these last two that I would like to close. Privileges are not individual, unalienable, God given rights. Neither are they government provided entitlements. They hold instead elements of each.
The so-called “right” to vote is one example. It is not an individual unalienable right granted by God. In the state of nature there is no need to vote. Voting only has meaning within a society. When men leave the state of nature to form a civil society they surrender their absolute individual sovereignty in exchange for a voice in the society and a say in how the society will be run – without that privilege there is no reason to quit the state of nature. And this too explains the difference between the views of conservatives and the views of statists with regard to the “right” to vote.
The conservative seeks always to see that the government he has quit the state of nature to enter into does only that which is necessary to preserve his individual, unalienable rights. He thus works to ensure that his voice in the civil society is not diluted by the voices of those that are opposed to the goal of preserving those rights. People that remain in the state of nature and war with the civil society logically should not be given the privilege of ordering it. And, since voting is a privilege of participants in the civil society rather than a right it is also logical to exclude those who are members of other societies from ordering the civil society of which they are not a part. IN OTHER WORDS, felons (who are opposed to the civil society) and non-citizens should be excluded from the voter rolls – precisely because they are not a part of the civil society which by voting they would be ordering.
The statist on the other hand always seeks a larger constituency in order to promote his aims. The statist offers to the people the enticements of entitlements precisely because it increases the power of the state and gives the state a means by which to ensure the “proper behavior” of the populace. By fostering a dependent class the statist can gain control over people by enticement and through fear. Enticement because by nature humans are greedy and will seek entitlement at the expense of others. Fear because once a person believes himself entitled to something the thread of having it taken away leads him to defend that entitlement – again at the expense of others. By offering the carrot and the stick the statist leads his constituents into slavery. By treating the vote as a “right” that the conservative is “denying” to any given class of people the statist both marginalizes the conservative and entices those outside the civil society to enter into it – a devil’s bargain that eventually saps the morals and character of the people. It does this not through the entry of corrupted people into the society, but by enslaving new entrants into it from the outset.
And so at last we come to DUTY. Recall that I said earlier that our rights tell us what we may do for ourselves, and not what we may require from others. It is then our DUTY to exercise those rights without infringing upon the rights of others. We may enjoy our life, our liberty, our property, and our pursuit of happiness – provided that we do not take from others their lives, their liberty, their property, or prevent them from pursuing their own happiness. It is our DUTY to fight against any act by government that serves to enslave rather than liberate the members of the civil society. That means we must fight against ALL entitlement programs – even if we ourselves might benefit from them – because government entitlement programs do not liberate us. They enslave us and that is anathema to our duty to exercise our rights without infringing upon the rights of others.
And lastly, we have the DUTY to enjoy our privileges in a responsible manner. The privilege of voting should not be wasted. By entering into the civil society we have exchanged our absolute right to judge and enforce the law of nature for the privilege of helping to order a society which will both judge and enforce that law for us with the goal of preserving our rights. Failing to do what we can to see to it that the civil society lives up to its obligations to us as individuals is a failure of our DUTY to ourselves and to that society.
NEVER can we give up. We must always do what we can to see to it that those we choose to represent us in the society we have joined truly represent us as individuals. Where they do not, we must fight to see that they are replaced with people that will. We have a duty to do this, both for ourselves and for one another. And we need to do it as effectively as we can. Speaking out helps but it is not enough. Utilizing the great PRIVILEGE of our vote is the most effective way we have to order our society.
About a year or so ago I changed the name of my blog from the eponymous “Perri Nelson’s Website” to “Individual Liberty – Individual Responsibility”. I spend a lot of time talking about our liberties, but they are meaningless without the paired individual responsibility to exercise them. It’s a duty we all share. I exhort you, my fellow conservatives, to do your duty.
Originally posted on another web site that I no longer affiliate myself with.
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David responded with:
 | Government mandated "rights" to steal from some obviously violate the rights of those stolen from.
More insidious is the tendency for folks to accept government licensing and other regulation of God-given rights. Once the licensing of a right is accepted, then those who accept that licensing have abdicated their right. (Yes, the right to bear arms, depending as it does on the fundamental right to self-defense, is an obvious target of government anarch-tyrannists who do NOT want citizens able to defend themselves from predation... by ordinary outlaws OR an outlaw government, but all God-given rights are up for licensing and restriction by government anarcho-tyrannists.) |