Rights from the source... so to speak

So where we left off yesterday was with saying that one thing we can say unequivocally about our Rights at this point, is that we are not Given them by legislators, philosophers or prophets, they come from a much more unimpeachable source than that.

They come to us, through us. Let me back up, to back that up, by first ticking off two big huge camps of my fellow Americans, those who are religious, and those who claim to be scientific (with the implied assumption that the religious cannot be scientific. Quick! Someone get Doc Brown to jump in his time travelling DeLorean & get that memo back to Isaac Newton, I'm sure he'll find the charge fascinating), with an analogy which, hopefully after giving it a whirl, will help smooth a path for each to set aside their beliefs and agree upon what neither of their beliefs will see as being a compromise.

Rosy Fingered Dawn
One of the first casualties of modernity was authorship. Homer, despite what those who were much closer in time to him and to the still living traditions that were handed down to them of his being a single individual poet, modernists claimed 'Homer' to be a convenient name given to many authors, and his works are claimed to be nothing more than the contributions of many that've been stitched together under that name. There's been much analysis demonstrating one assertion after another about the author, and even more about what he (they) really meant, what Achilles really was like, etc.

One thing that is easy to say, is that those claiming this don't really know, they simply find it plausible, more plausible than one individual being talented enough to write the Homerian epics (Quick! Get Doc Brown again, this time get this memo back to Shakespeare!). But the issues of authorship is of less consequence than what else you begin seeing, that amidst all the assertions about who wrote what, all of that criticism soon begins to become criticism of criticism, and the actual text, which does exist and which sparked it all, soon becomes lost beneath the jabber about it. To the point that people of Periclean Athens, would not recognize in the least the epics or those populating them, such as the pouting, man-child in a infantile temper tantrum, which today goes by the name 'Achilles' (BTW, this book "The War that killed Achilles" does an excellent job of restoring a reasoned perspective to Achilles and to Homer, and why our ancestors found the story to be so valuable).

But whether the author is Homer, or a composite of many authors, the only thing that can be said with any certainty, is that they've all nearly lost sight of the original works of the Iliad and the Odyssey and why anybody ever bothered with reading them in the first place.

But one thing that remains available to us today, and very nearly as it did nearly three thousand years ago to those in ancient Athens, are the epics themselves, The Iliad & The Odyssey.

What's my point?
My point is that if you want to understand and get value from those masterpieces, fuhgeddaboud these unsettled, and unsettle-able distractions over who authored what, and instead, concentrate upon the valuable actual works that are available to you here and now, as they were to our fore-fore-fore-fathers, then you might actually learn something.

The same point applies in regard to our Rights. Fuhgedaboud what neither of you will ever agree upon, whether the author is God, or Evolution or something else, and direct your attention to what all of you can perceive, recognize and assess together, the epic itself, Mankind. Examine the quality of 'the book', and the author will receive all do praise from that, as Jefferson said,

"Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a god; because, if there be one, he must more approve the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear."

. Deal? Swell. So. Onwards.

As I was saying, it is self-evident
Our Rights are not Given to us by legislators, philosophers or prophets, they come to us and to our understanding, from a much more unimpeachable source than that, they come to us, through us.

Not from our minds.

Or at least not from our minds in the same fashion as ditties, poems, stories, lies and notions come from our minds; they are not the products of our wishes, fabrications or innovations but from observations of the nature of man himself; by observing our minds as situated within our bodies and within the world; our Rights are able to be derived from the nature of what makes us human beings, and as such they are equally alike, and equally present, in every person, in every way, and as such, we are made able to hold these truths to be self-evident.

Note: To my 7th grade civics teacher, Mr. McClellan, who mocked

'Self evident? Do YOU understand what they mean by that? No? Then they can't be self evident, can they?!'

, Self-Evident does not mean something that is brain-dead obvious or something as perceptually apparent as a cold sore. What it means, is that for those who consider and come to some understanding of a matter, certain issues become self-evident, they stand out as the rest of the information becomes better understood. Just as to the first time casual observer, the actions of people standing upon or running around bases or dashing about the field in the game of baseball, seem chaotic, but to the person who understands the game, it is self-evident who and what the Short Stop is, and why, it is self-evident who the pitcher is, and why, it is self-evident who the Umpire is, and why.

For something to be self-evident to someone, requires that they have some knowledge and understanding of the matters involved, and once understood, certain matters will become self-evidently true.

If, on the other hand, you don't understand even the basics, nothing will be self-evident, nothing but your, and the civics teachers, ignorance. To people raised under the rule of law, living in liberty, and understanding the philosophical underpinnings of that liberty they had become accustomed to, certain truths most certainly do become self-evident. Because those who haven't bothered to grasp those necessary fundamentals, fail to see that, is not an indictment of those self-evident truths, but only an indictment of themselves.

To those well versed in the Greco-Roman-English and Judeo-Christian underpinnings of our culture, these truths were self-evident, and they were so no matter which source was claimed as the disputed authorship of Man and his nature; whether a person at the time of our founding (and still), were religious, and found them comfortably expressed in scriptures such as the Ten Commandments; or whether they were secular and found them expressed in the ideas of Cicero, Aquinas, Locke and Blackstone (or, more likely, both) - These Rights are indisputably written into our very fabric by the author of Mankind & who wielded the pen - deity or philosopher or scientist - in this sense, matters not in the least; if your concern is with what is true, then the reality of the evidence in this matter is sufficient enough, and readily available to any with a judiciously open and reasoning mind who is concerned with discovering the nature and properties of reality, and in doing so, our Rights do become Self-Evident.

Compressing Time
So what are your Rights? Answer that, and then you will know where they come from, and what role your govt and your legislators play in the matter, but it will require compressing some time (which I've partly uncompressed before here, and here). For those Americans who are religious and accept our Individual Rights as being God Given, no further explanation is necessary - which might be fine for you, but it leaves you no common ground to meet upon with your fellow Americans. For those who are not religious, or who would also like to grasp the argument for Individual Rights from the evidence available to their own eyes and mind, the essentials can be presented briefly (ahem), and in doing that you too will be able to find common ground from which to agree with your more religious counterparts.

The Evidence of your senses - it's a jungle out there
Each of us, if not afflicted with some dread disease or impairment, each of us has awareness, and we each of us have the ability, and necessity, of making choices about what we will do with what we become aware of, which is called Free Will (Locke & others disliked the term because it is misleading, what it describes is the vaculty of volition, not that which carries it out, the Will. Locke said

" ... liberty being as little applicable to the will, as swiftness of motion is to sleep, or squareness-to virtue. Every one would laugh at the absurdity “"

It is a little bit like saying you have 'Free Muscle'", it isn't the Will that is free, but your volitional ability to choose. But we're stuck with the label, a bit like Tidal Waves are stuck to Tsunami's. Deal with it.

That we have the volitional ability to make choices is a plain fact, available to any honest and inquiring mind, and with as first hand information as it is possible to get, seeing as how you are both the experimenter and the experiment, and the results are indisputable - those who do dispute it invariably fudge it with "It's as if you made a choice", which besides being a con, is a distinction without a difference. If you'd like to choose to assert your disagreement... well... if the absurdities in just those nine words aren't enough to make you feel ashamed of yourself... then feel free to go and dispute it with the likes of Daniel Dennett or Richard Dawkins or Sam Harris, here, allow me to give you the excuse you're looking for so you can claim that my words determined your actions, against your non-existent choice: "You're deluded or an idiot, and a dishonest one at that. Be gone."

Those of you who are still here reading, are doing so because you chose to. Those who left, chose to leave. Case closed.

There is no rationalistic fanaticizing here, and no room for it, no airy faerie conjectures are involved, nothing which some overly uneducated twit has room to say 'well, that may be true for you, but it is not for me.', no this is something which is true of every human being on the face of the earth, whether they are born and raised in New York City or in the stone age jungles of New Guinea, all men have awareness and the ability to make choices about their actions; Human Beings have Free Will. Period.

Each person is aware of their surroundings, and each must make decisions about how to respond to them, and knowledge (a contextual relation of facts which allow common generalizations to be made and from which meaning and principles can be derived, and further integrated into a wider context of knowledge) improves the quality of your decisions.

For the jungle dweller, in their awareness of being faced with a tiger, they must choose whether to run, or maybe to try and defend yourself with one of those branches you see laying near you on the ground. For the Urban dweller, if an elevator opens wide before you, should you step inside, or not? is it going Up, or Down? Will it take you nearer to or farther from your job interview? In either case you must make a choice about what to do in regards to the nature of the reality you are facing. There is no intermediary, no noumenal world, no collective consciousness to pierce, no impenetrable paradigms restraining you, and there is no escape from the necessity of choosing, there are no environmental causes that will determine a decision for you - you very well may see only one choice available but you must still make it.

There is no possible way to live as a human being, without making choices based upon your awareness and knowledge of your surroundings, both in space and in time (and congratulations, we just shook off a good chunk of the accreted muck of nearly three centuries of 'modern' philosophy).

How carefully you consider your surroundings, and the decisions you make within them, will determine how effective your choices will likely be, which will also depend greatly upon the depth of your knowledge of your surroundings - the more deeply you perceive and understand them, the more likely your decisions will be able to benefit you, and to what extent; and again, it applies just as equally in the jungles of New Guinea or New York.

If in the arboreal jungle, your knowledge of those sticks laying on the ground before you, could be of life and death importance. If you simply look and pick one up at random to use as a club, that perceptual level understanding of your surroundings might benefit you... or it might lead to an ineffective struggle that serves only to whet the appetite of the tiger, an ineffective defense that leaves you dead and the tiger full. On the other hand, if you have some knowledge of the woods that those sticks are made of, and use your imagination to envision what you might do with the brittle, but hard wood, you might, by that process of Reason, select that particular stick, snap the end of it over your knee, and make it sharp enough to form a crude spear and up your chances of survival with the tiger by leaps and bounds.

Similarly with the urban jungle. The fellow that takes the elevator up to an interview, answers the questions well, just might get that job. But the fellow that takes the elevator up to the interview knowing something of the business he's interviewing for, and of the company and person interviewing him, might learn enough through questions of his own, to imagine that taking this particular job is likely to lead to a dead end position that won't benefit him in the long run, and so through that Reasoning, choose to continue searching for a better interview and position.

The seedling of our Rights is derived from that simple truth of our Human Nature, that we have awareness of our surroundings, the ability to transform facts into knowledge and the capability of imaginatively reasoning our way through making decisions that put us in command of our surroundings, and the need to be free to do so. Our Rights are those actions which our existence naturally requires us to be able to make, and without which, we could not live a fully human life. They also entail the responsibility of individuals recognizing that their own Rights depend upon not forcibly treading upon the rights of another in the free exercise of their Rights. In short, Rights are the logical consequence of creatures employing their Free Will in a rational respect for reality, where truth and understanding are your most vital tools of survival.

Property
Something else the two jungle scenarios have in common, is the necessity of Property to the exercise of your Rights. That stick, simply by picking it up, is transformed by your effort and purpose, from detritus of the landscape, into personal property, but not simply by the action of picking it up, as Locke seemed to think, but by picking it up for a purpose, it is the intellectual actions of your mind which enable you to transform mere matter into personal property, and such property is essential to mankind in the exercise of his Right to life and living it.

If you cannot take those actions necessary to your survival, you cannot live. If you cannot retain the materials your actions bring you - your property - you will not live. If you do not extend the same understanding to those you associate with, you will have no one to live with... and a man alone is but a meal for the animal kingdom.

The same principle applies to the urban dweller, and though not as perceptually apparent as a club or a spear, his intellectual property is just as useful and the use and right to it just as necessary, as the weapon is to his cousin in the jungles of New Guinnea. Property, Private Property, is that which we transform through our actions, guided by our mental actions, and through which, if no prior legitimate claim exists, they become ours.

That 'prior legitimate claim' brings us to another key factor in Rights. Prior legitimate claims or disputes about them, are what brings us to the point of being able to lift ourselves above the level of the jungle dweller, and into civilization, but to do so we need a method - other than bashing each other's brains in - for resolving disputes, so that we can live in association with others, and benefit from doing so, and that method is the Law, along with a system of Justice for administering it.

Laying Down the Law
Law begins with an attempt at fairness: 'If you do this, I'll do that, deal?', and slowly extends beyond simple perceptual bargaining, to dealing with situations where two or more parties who find themselves in a dispute, can be agree to have a third party decide the matter for them, even though that third party won't have any way of knowing what happened, and probably won't know either party involved - that's a huge leap. Your newly elevated society, to become elevated, needs a way to examine the situation and judge whether Joe or Bob did something, even when both deny they did (how they determine that, we'll have to leave for another time). And even stickier, you need a system where Joe, Bob and every one else understands that the truth, let alone satisfaction, may not ever be realized, but you will need a system where each person can at least agree that they had as fair a shake as possible, and agree to abide by the results.

The alternative is robbery, assault, feuds, clan warfare and Hobbes's war of all against all. The Law is your escape from the Animal Kingdom, to a Humane society.

You cannot live without making choices, using your mind to enhance and defend your life and provide yourself with the means and material required for living - your Rights, in raw form, are those actions which your life requires you to choose to perform, and what results from them, in order to to live life as is natural as a human being - that is the basis for Natural Rights, or Individual Rights.

You cannot live well, however, without doing so in association with others, and the price of that association, society, is that each person agrees to delegate their use of force against another, or their possessions, to a set of rules, administered by a widely respected few who are trusted to treat all comers fairly - that is the basis for Natural Law, and your Individual Rights find their support and defense, in it. Through Natural Law, your right to take those actions you deem necessary for your life, and which do not infringe upon another's rights, those requirements of Human life, are elevated to become Rights to freedom of speech, liberty of action and association, and a right to the property which results from those actions, and for which those actions are taken in the first place. From an earlier post:

"That delegation, is the true, and only sense, where the community and the individual are mingled into one collective body. It is through Law, and the system of Justice which it serves, where the One in the Many, is actually found.

Good Walls Build Good Neighbors
It is important to also keep in mind that Rights are the societal recognition of barriers between individuals, which must not be crossed without invitation and consent, they are the political equivalents of walls and doors, and breaching them either individually or on the part of society (which would then reclassify itself as a mob - collective action without reason) should be viewed in the same light as physical trespassers and burglars.

More so. The violation of Rights, properly understood, is not just a violation of custom, but of reasoned rationality itself, to the safety and well being of the polity, and opposition to reality and its requirements. Rights are not permissions, having to ask permission to exercise your rights - the requirements of human life - makes you less than human in your attributes, and yielding them makes you a slave.

Where Law unites all of societies individuals into One body, Rights provide the separation which preserves them as Individuals, the Many.""

Your presence in society, as opposed to living secluded in a cave, is your private assent and signature to that societal contract.

"Wha?! I didn't sign anything?!"

, yes, you did, and no it doesn't require your physical signature, anymore than you need to explain to each person you meet

"Hi! I've chosen not to not punch you in the face."

, it is the default, if you are going to live amongst others it is 'self-evident' that you must do so reasonably and peacefully, it doesn't require your acknowledgment, only your implied consent.

And the maintenance of that contract, as the long pitiable history of man has shown, had better be carefully tended to by those entrusted with societies power, the government, and by those members of society who entrust government with their power - or that power will be abused. Individuals have Rights, States have Powers, and through carefully written, clear laws, their balance must be maintained, or Power will seek to serve itself at the people's expense.

The nature of Power is violence. The nature of those possessing Power, is the urge to use it, for 'good reasons'. As the apocryphal saying goes,

'Power, like fire, is a useful servant, but a fearful master."

Recap - Our Rights come to us, through us
We are not given our Rights by legislators, philosophers or prophets, they are written by the author of Man into our very nature as human beings. Man, by nature, has free will, he Must choose in order to live and his reason enables him to, and requires him to do so, and for his choices to be effective, they must be in accordance with what is in reality, true - when that is understood, then certain truths do become self-evident:

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,--That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. "

It would be as offensive to the laws of 'natures God' to pluck the wings from birds, as to forcibly deprive a man of his choice to act, speak, associate, produce and preserve what his very nature requires of him, what "the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them", to be able to do in order to live a fully human life.

It doesn't get much more God given than that, and not believing in God is no escape from realizing it; it is just as clearly spelled out for the scientist & Darwinist to see in the empirical nature of man, as can be grasped by the philosopher's concepts and principles, or through the words of the Bible.

To choose to breathe water is to choose to die, and though its impact isn't as immediately visible, to choose to live a life that denies or mocks morality, whether it comes from the Ten Commandments or the philosophers Ethics, is to make the very same choice - they aren't true because they were written, they were written because they were true - to turn away from that... even in a secular world, the wages of sin is slavery and death.

What was never theirs to give, the legislators, philosophers and prophets have been doing their very best to take away from us, attempting to transform our Rights into simple entitlements, benefits and privileges, which is exactly what modernism does, and the first casualty of modernity was Free Will , then Private Property, then Knowledge, and then Morality - next on their agenda, are our Rights, and we will find out today, with the Supreme Court decision on ObamaoCare, how successful they've been.

Next post, how Modernity made such a fine mess of things.

You have No 'Constitutional Rights'. None. Nada.

You have No 'Constitutional Rights'. That's right. That's what I said. As an American citizen, you have no 'Constitutional Rights', none, zero, nada.

You do, however, have Rights by virtue of being a rational human being, and some of those Rights have been singled out for protection within the borders of the United States of America by the Constitution with which its government was formed and which it takes its jurisdiction from, and by way of that same Constitution, and some of the amendments to it, which include, but are not limited to, the first ten amendments known as the Bill of Rights, Individuals are able to become citizens of the United States of America, and enjoy having their Individual Rights protected by those laws which derive their power from that same Constitution, of the United States of America.

Why do I bother to say it that way? Because it is important to. Why? Because if you think that you have 'constitutional rights', rights granted to you by the Constitution, then you have NO Rights at all. None, zero, nada.

Why? Because if you think that your Rights were granted to you by the law, then legislators who write the laws, can revoke or gut those rights, by passing still other laws. If the legislator's pen is where you got your Rights from, then you in fact have no 'rights' at all, but only such allowances which your friendly neighborhood legislator is pleased to extend to you. Such things, which may go by the name of 'Rights', are in actuality, nothing of the sort, they are simply privileges.

Nothing more.

Not Rights.

Why say this now, and in this way?

Because in a couple days time the Supreme Court of the United States is going to announce the result of their deliberations upon the constitutionality of ObamaoCare, and I am saying this in this way, because it is being reported that the SCOTUS is deciding whether or not Americans have a Right to Healthcare.

Which is a ridiculous idea.

Of course you have a Right to Healthcare. You absolutely have a Right to receive healthcare, should someone agree to provide it to you, either for free, or for a fee - you have a right to receive quality healthcare, just as those who are able to provide it to you, have a right to do so. What you do not have, and no one else does either, is a right to force others to provide that healthcare to you, against their will, either physically, or financially.

No law can change that, because no law and no constitution ever granted you any of your Rights in the first place. The SCOTUS might very well approve ObamaoCare as a law, but that will neither make a Right, or make the law right.

They have the power to call it a law - just as Justice Taney's SCOTUS had the power to declare Dred Scott to be only 'property' and not a man - there is little doubting their power to do that, but they do not have the Right to. No one does, and declaring it to be so does not make it so, anymore than declaring Dred Scott to be less than a man, made him any less of a man.

No man can grant a Right to another; no lawgiver, no philosopher, no prophet, no majority of men, have a right to take away a Right, or to make a right either. They may acquire the power to impose such a law upon us (should We The People be careless enough to allow it), in the same way that any robber who is bold and brutish enough can impose his will upon you, taking what they desire by force, in violation of your Rights.

But such a demonstration of power will never create a Right, or make it right, even if they pass a law that says so.

Our Laws do not give us our Rights. They protect them. Or violate them.

Nothing more.

The Founding Fathers gave us no Rights
In fact it wasn't even the Framers of the Constitution who singled out those few particular Rights we normally think of as 'our Rights', it was instead We The People who demanded that the legislature draft a Bill of Rights to protect our Rights, as a condition of the Constitution being ratified, and the Government of the United States of America, as we know it, being formed at all.

In framing the constitution, the majority of the Founders felt that they needed only refer to a few Rights, and those only in passing as needed in framing the Constitution - that of Contract, Representation, to live in a Republic, protection of our Intellectual Property Rights (patents) and other particulars of law, thinking that the rest of the Rights of We The People would be secure by virtue of the fact that they gave no explicit power to the government through the constitution, to abridge them, and so, they thought, our individual rights would in effect remain secure by being absent from the powers they gave the Constitution.

We The People, disagreed.

In debating the merits of ratifying the constitution (see the Federalist, and anti-Federalist papers) it became apparent that We The People were not very well assured that enough of our Rights were secured by the constitution as it stood, and as a condition of ratification, a promise was made that the incoming legislature would see to it that a number of our Individual Rights would be specifically recognized and amended to the Constitution, as the law of the land, and some, Patrick Henry for instance, were not very satisfied with even that.

"Does it not insult your judgments to tell you, Adopt first, and then amend! Is your rage for novelty so great, that you are first to sign and seal, and then to retract? Is it possible to conceive a greater solecism? I am at a loss what to say. You agree to bind yourselves hand and foot — for the sake of what? Of being unbound. You go into a dungeon — for what? To get out. Is there no danger, when you go in, that the bolts of federal authority shall shut you in? Human nature never will part from power. Look for an example of a voluntary relinquishment of power, from one end of the globe to another: you will find none. Nine tenths of our fellowmen have been, and are now, depressed by the most intolerable slavery, in the different parts of the world, because the strong hand of power has bolted them in the dungeon of despotism." - Patrick Henry (Speech to the Virginia ratifying assembly 1788)

, and Henry was very nearly right - the legislature delayed and balked at the idea of producing a Bill of Rights. It was James Madison, then a member of the House of Representatives, who insisted that they fulfill their obligation, and wrote the rough draft for the Bill of Rights himself and insisted that they be debated, even though Madison, the father of the Constitution, was leery of a Bill of Rights as well.

Most of the states already had their own bills, and he was concerned that in naming a few critical Rights, it would have the effect of reducing our rights to those few that were specifically noted. There is much in Madison's argument that is worth your consideration, it certainly consumed much of his consideration, for he wasn't worried about 'granting' too many Rights, but with losing more than could be written down,

"..., the rights in question are reserved by the manner in which the federal powers are granted. 2 because there is great reason to fear that a positive declaration of some of the most essential rights could not be obtained in the requisite latitude. I am sure that the rights of Conscience in particular, if submitted to public definition would be narrowed much more than they are likely ever to be by an assumed power. One of the objections in New England was that the Constitution by prohibiting religious tests opened a door for Jews Turks & infidels. 3. because the limited powers of the federal Government and the jealousy of the subordinate Governments, afford a security which has not existed in the case of the State Governments, and exists in no other. 4 because experience proves the inefficacy of a bill of rights on those occasions when its controul is most needed. Repeated violations of these parchment barriers have been committed by overbearing majorities in every State. In Virginia I have seen the bill of rights violated in every instance where it has been opposed to a popular current."

IOW, what he understood, was that we have many, many Rights, too many to be noted and defined and protected - and the attempt to do so, no matter how voluminous they might be, would still come up short (for instance, if you say 'you have a right to free speech' a slick lawyer can say 'you were granted the right to speak, but not a right to write'), in ways that might not yet even be realized in his time.

Madison, however, in giving the matter careful consideration, felt that he came upon a way in which he might be able to secure the unlimited nature of our rights, without naming and reducing them to only those few ones named. His brilliant innovaitons were what formed the core of what eventually became the 9th and 10th amendments:

Article IX - The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

Article X - The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

Does that sound like the Rights and Powers of We The People are something which comes from the Legislator's pen?... or something which the legislator needs to take careful pains not to abbrogate?

It's also worth noting what usually is never taken note of, the Preamble to the Bill of Rights, because it makes it clear that our Rights were not privileges granted to us by our govt as if they were simply conveniences cited in order to 'provide for the general welfare', as the 'living(dead) document' proponents would have it, no, the Preamble makes it clear that they were meant as restrictions upon government which were imposed upon it by We The People; the same We The People who created that government, through its constitution. And that is likely the chief reason why this Preamble is rarely, if ever, mentioned in any textbook, school or seat of government - for as Patrick Henry noted above, power seeks to preserve and increase its power, it doesn't like having to admit to any limitations of its power.

Preamble to the Bill of Rights :

"Begun and held at the City of New York, on Wednesday, the 4th of March, 1789.

The conventions of a number of the states having, at the time of their adopting the Constitution, expressed a desire, in order to prevent misconstruction or abuse of its powers, that further declaratory and restrictive clauses should be added; and as extending the ground of public confidence in the government will best insure the beneficent ends of its institution;--

Resolved, by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America, in Congress assembled, two thirds of both houses concurring, that the following articles be proposed to the legislatures of the several states, as amendments to the Constitution of the United States, all or any of which articles, when ratified by three fourths of the said legislatures, to be valid, to all intents and purposes, as part of the said Constitution, namely,--

Articles in Addition to, and Amendment of, the Constitution of the United States of America, proposed by Congress, and ratified by the Legislatures of the several States, pursuant to the Fifth Article of the original Constitution.

IOW We The People, in order to prevent our government from abusing its powers and infringing upon our Rights, insisted that some of our essential political rights, essential to thwarting the rise of tyranny, be recognized and defended by law, at the source of our laws - the Constitution.

Our Govt did not grant us our Rights. In fact that first legislature, one of the finest ever, did not want to follow through on its promise of  legislating a Bill of Rights. Govt, power, always feels itself above obligations to those it 'serves', it trusts itself; it is up to us, We The People, to continually remind our Govt that it serves us, not the other way around.

So we have our Rights protected in the foundations of our laws, because We The People demanded that they be recognized by law, but... that doesn't really tell us what is being recognized, does it? The fact that we demanded that our Rights be recognized doesn't tell us the nature of what Rights are, does it, it simply lets you know that you have a bunch of something being protected for you... but a bunch of what? Why? Where from do they come?

One thing we can say unequivocally about our Rights at this point, is that we are not given them by legislators, philosophers or prophets, they come from a much more unimpeachable source than that.

What they are and where they come from, tomorrow.

Liberty - It all hangs together, or we all hang separately

Liberty - What are you talking about?
There are a whole lot of terms flying around fast and furious right now: Rights, human rights, goldfish rights, workers’ rights, direct democracy, pure democracy, citizens initiatives, citizen rejection initiatives, republic, representative republic, socialism, communism, Marxism, capitalism... with that many terms, and even more definitions (real or implied) flying around, it's worth taking a moment to refocus on the fundamentals that do matter. Do that, and maybe it can help you to clear away the ones that don't matter and see more clearly what does - if you don't, your liberty may be just one vote away from fading away.

Republic
 When trying to figure out the details of what you're talking about, it helps to first figure out why you're talking about them. We could go back to the original, original argument, such as where James Madison gave an excellent description of the structure of the republic he was hoping that We The People would choose to become (and we did), in Federalist #39, and also in #51, but they deal too much with the details and machinery of a Republic, at least as regards what I'm after here.

We'd do well to refocus on the fundamentals of what the purpose of a Republic is, before we bother with how to arrange it.

Along those lines, John Adams nailed the purpose of a Republic: The protection of Property Rights:

"...the original meaning of the word republic could be no other than a government in which the property of the people predominated and governed; and it had more relation to property than liberty. It signified a government, in which the property of the public, or people, and of every one of them, was secured and protected by law. This idea, indeed, implies liberty; because property cannot be secure unless the man be at liberty to acquire, use, or part with it, at his discretion, and unless he have his personal liberty of life and limb, motion and rest, for that purpose. It implies, moreover, that the property and liberty of all men, not merely of a majority, should be safe; for the people, or public, comprehends more than a majority, it comprehends all and every individual; and the property of every citizen is a part of the public property, as each citizen is a part of the public, people, or community. The property, therefore, of every man has a share in government, and is more powerful than any citizen or party of citizens; it is governed only by the law...."

What Adams and many others of the time realized, was that without solid support for property rights, no other rights are even possible. From his 'Defense of the Constitutions of Government of the United States'

"The moment the idea is admitted into society, that property is not as sacred as the laws of God, and that there is not a force of law and public justice to protect it, anarchy and tyranny commence. If "Thou shalt not covet," and "Thou shalt not steal," were not commandments of Heaven, they must be made inviolable precepts in every society, before it can be civilized or made free."

If property rights go, you no longer have rights of any kind, only favors... if you keep those with the power to bestow, or withdraw, those favors, sufficiently flattered, that is. The purpose of a Republic, is to structure a government which will preserve the property of the people, and through that their innumerable unalienable rights, through few and defined laws.

Law
 What protects our property rights is the Law... but what do we mean by that? IMHO Cicero nailed it well:

“True law is right reason in agreement with nature"

, but what did he mean by that? Does it apply to us today? I mean after all, following the New York Times usage of Reason as a tool for the effective use of logical fallacies, should I even care if Cicero was right, if he doesn't tell me what I want to hear? And besides, Cicero wore a toga & I wear dockers... what could he possibly have to say to me, right?

Turns out, there's plenty he has to say to us, and nearly all of it extremely relevant to your life, right now. Do we flatter ourselves to think we are the first to have to deal with amoral politicians and talking heads? Are we the first to have to suffer fools who think that making something lawful makes it right? Are we the first to have to battle with proponents of a 'living constitution'? Hardly. Have a look at what Cicero described,:

"It is therefore an absurd extravagance in some philosophers to assert that all things are necessarily just, which are established by the civil laws and the institutions of the people. Are then the laws of tyrants just, simply because they are laws? If the thirty tyrants of Athens imposed certain laws on the Athenians, and if these Athenians were delighted with these tyrannical laws, are we therefore bound to consider these laws as just? For my own part, I do not think such laws deserve any greater estimation than that past during our own interregnum, which ordained, that the dictator should be empowered to put to death with impunity, whatever citizens he pleased, without hearing them in their own defense...."

Despite the prating of our elected fools in Washington D.C., laws are valid only when they are just, not simply because they've been written down and voted on 'all legal-like'. Cicero explains what makes law just:

"...There can be but one essential justice, which cements society, and one law which establishes this justice. This law is right reason, which is the true rule of all commandments and prohibitions. Whoever neglects this law, whether written or unwritten, is necessarily unjust and wicked.

But if justice consists in submission to written laws and national customs, and if, as the Epicureans [the utilitarian’s in our day] persist in affirming, everything must be measured by utility alone, he who wishes to find an occasion of breaking such laws and customs will be sure to discover it. So that real justice remains powerless if not supported by nature, and this pretended justice is overturned by that very utility which they call its foundation..."

Law, if not rooted in the nature of reality and of Right & Wrong, is but one loophole woven through another - a barrier to you, but an open door to the powerful, or those who have their ear. Without laws rooted in natural law, in right and wrong, the only defense you have against the government coming into your home and telling you what to eat, or taking your iPod, iPhone and iPad from you in order to spread your wealth around, is if those laws are based in what we can see for ourselves to be real and true, and so use our minds to conform to that, aka, Right Reason. And that has importance beyond the laws itself, for when the people see that law is something to be feared as a weapon against them, rather than revered as a defense of their property and rights, that it instead serves one group over another, then society itself unravels. Cicero explains:

"... But this is not all. If nature does not ratify law, all the virtues lose their sway. What becomes of generosity, patriotism, or friendship? Where should we find the desire of benefitting our neighbors, or the gratitude that acknowledges kindness? For all these virtues proceed from our natural inclination to love and cherish our associates. This is the true basis of justice, and without this, not only the mutual charities of men, but the religious services of the gods, would become obsolete; for these are preserved, as I imagine, rather by the natural sympathy which subsists between divine and human beings, than by mere fear and timidity.

If the will of the people, the decrees of the senate, the adjudications of magistrates, were sufficient to establish justice, the only question would be how to gain suffrages, and to win over the votes of the majority, in order that corruption and spoliation, and the falsification of wills, should become lawful. But if the opinions and suffrages of foolish men had sufficient weight to outbalance the nature of things, might they not determine among them, that what is essentially bad and pernicious should henceforth pass for good and beneficial? Or why should not a law able to enforce injustice, take the place of equity? Would not this same law be able to change evil into good, and good into evil?"

Sadly leftists today (and not a few little 'r' republicans) wouldn't consider this a rhetorical question, but a challenge to one up each other... for the children no doubt. But if that's the case, if passing laws makes a thing right, or if money is what the treasury department prints, then why borrow money from China? Why not just print all we need? The fact is that there is a reality, and just as there is an up and a down, there is a right and a wrong, and your journey will be smoother if you take the time to figure out which is which.

Cicero's ideas, which were very much on the minds of our Founding Fathers when they wrote, debated and ratified the constitution, are central to our form of government. If we remove them or ignore them, which amount to the same thing, we risk... well... the chaos we have today, and which is but a taste of what we may face tomorrow, if we don't check our pro-regress.

Cicero's ideas were further developed through Thomas Aquinas and by many others down through the centuries, such as by the likes of John Locke, into those ideas which were expressed by Thomas Jefferson when he said that,

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed"

, which as Cicero noted,

"Whoever neglects this law, whether written or unwritten, is necessarily unjust and wicked"

, and their laws are no laws at all.

Hence our Independence Day which we celebrate upon the 4th of July, the 'unalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness'... but what do we mean by Rights?

Rights
 Whenever you hear people speaking of 'human rights', what you should set your spidey sense a tingling and direct your focus upon, is that they seem to presume that there can be such a thing as other sorts of rights, or even collective group rights - there cannot be. There are only Individual Rights, and they are not goodies bestowed upon men by kings, legislators or any other outside force; Rights are derived from the nature of man, not from groups of men. Our Rights rise from that nature and reasoning ability which makes us individuals capable of behaving reasonably and in accordance with agreed upon rules with our fellow man - the attempt to ascribe Rights to groups is only a back door method for denying their proper rights to individuals.

Anyway, here’s a whirlwind dash through it all (see Cicero’s Republic & Laws for a good development of this as Natural Reason) which I’ve found useful before, and which I think you'll find useful now.

Our Rights are all, and only, derived from our nature as human beings, from the observable requirements of living a human life; our Rights begin with thinking. As with a cow in a snow filled pasture which (it’s said) will starve to death, being unable to think of looking under the snow – the basic fact for us is

• no thinking, no eating

But thinking in and of itself won't do it, it's got to be productive thought, - you may not get much for your efforts if your thinking tells you that digging & refilling a ditch over and over will spontaneously produce food and shelter (don't laugh, FDR, inspired by Keynesian economics, based an entire WPA program on just that - now that's shovel ready!) your thinking has to respect reality, it must be purposeful and to be effective it should follow orderly methods of self-checking (Logic) to make sure it's worthwhile from start to finish - in short Reasoning. Reason and the requirements for Reasoning, are the philosophical source for Natural Law (Cicero had a lot to say on that).

Respectful awareness of your surroundings is vital for creating any wealth - wealth being food, shelter, relationships, gizmos to perform tasks efficiently and productively - aka Property, and our individual lives as well as society, are based upon that property which we create, Property Rights.

To be able to reason, and to be reasonably productive, you have to not only be able to act on your conclusions, but to do so without being forced to act against your own reasoning. You have to be able to say what you think needs to be said, do what you think needs to be done, make the choices which you see and believe need to be made, without being forced to act against your own better judgment – the Right to Speech, the Right to not be unlawfully detained, accosted or restrained from religion and the free exercise thereof, all follow from this.

Being free to think and act to produce property is of course tied together with your need to confidently retain what you've spent your time and effort in producing, confident that your efforts won't be stolen from you, and in realizing the necessity of that to your life, you must extend the same consideration to others.

All of your productive actions are based upon, and directed towards getting, keeping or consuming the wealth of property which you have created, and none of that could be created if you denied the realities required to do so, and that same adherence to reality, to truth, is required of your actions and interactions with your fellows. Honesty and integrity contributes to all in society, while thievery steals from all in society in ways the thief never could begin to imagine.

Thievery, legal or otherwise, destroys not only your wealth, but the purpose of all of your actions and thoughts, which are requirements of your nature and ability to live as a human being.

To prevent or deprive you of your ability to think and act as you see fit, and not let you retain what you produce, is no different than plucking the wings off a bumble bee or removing the fangs & claws of a lion - neither would then be able to do what they need to do in order to live as their nature requires. In the same sense it is right, by our very nature, that we be secure in these Rights – they follow from our nature as human beings, they are unalienable from us.

So that's a rapid fire summary of our Rights and Liberties and the criminality of violating them. Our Rights are nothing but the recognition of what is required by "nature and natures God" in order for us to live as Men, from that fact we get our rights of property, free speech, self-defense, sanctity of contract - and most important of all is the fact that all of our Rights come not from words on paper, but because of the nature of being human – our Natural Rights as disclosed to us by exercising Right Reason, through Natural Law.

Collective Rights Are Wrong
The nature of Rights means that there is no such thing as "States Rights" either, states have powers, not rights (note the wording of the 9th Amendment and the 10th Amendment), and just as the attempt to ascribe rights to groups of men undercuts the rights of individual men, so too with states - recall that the first group clamoring for 'States Rights' were doing so in order to preserve slavery, rather than Individual Rights. And it was the realization of the concept of proper Individual Rights arising from the nature of Man, which made it impossible to consider one man as the possession of another.

John Locke put that idea this way,

" for law, in its true notion, is not so much the limitation as the direction of a free and intelligent agent to his proper interest, and prescribes no farther than is for the general good of those under that law: could they be happier without it, the law, as an useless thing, would of itself vanish; and that ill deserves the name of confinement which hedges us in only from bogs and precipices. So that, however it may be mistaken, the end of law is not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge freedom: for in all the states of created beings capable of laws, where there is no law, there is no freedom: for liberty is, to be free from restraint and violence from others; which cannot be, where there is no law: but freedom is not, as we are told, a liberty for every man to do what he lists: (for who could be free, when every other man’s humour might domineer over him?) but a liberty to dispose, and order as he lists, his person, actions, possessions, and his whole property, within the allowance of those laws under which he is, and therein not to be subject to the arbitrary will of another, but freely follow his own."

It comes down again and again to Property Rights, Law and Right Reason... and despite the New York Times recent 'breakthrough', that means using reason to pursue truth, and only secondarily as a weapon to win arguments - reverse that order, and literal dis-aster (loss of your guiding star) results.

Some examples of Reason being used as a weapon to win arguments, and in opposition to discovering what is true? When talk turns to group rights, we're sure to see the crazies piping up, getting crazier and crazier the more they apply their idiocies, resulting in things like cow rights and so forth... but keep in mind that this is a distraction too, one which the ideas of regulatory gurus like Cass Sunstein make clear in this one,

"Its astonishing conclusions could become law in due course.
Among them is that "decapitation of wild flowers at the roadside without rational reason" is essentially a crime. "

(H/T Caroline Mueller). When people like Sunstein are speaking up for insane anti-concepts such as 'animal lawyers', that's simply one of their nudges, what they are nudging us all towards is what Sunstein has always been entirely focused on: obliterating property rights.

While Saul Alinsky's "Rules for Radicals" became popular, and for good reason, IMHO a much more dangerous book, because it and its author isn't seen as radical by many, is Cass Sunstein's "FDR's Second Bill of Rights", this book, in its fundamentals, in what it seeks to destroy, property rights, and the smooth skill with which he twists seemingly reasonable sentiments to that purpose, his radicalism makes Alinsky's rabble rousing seem quaint (Note: I touched upon one key passage in it midway through this post, and am working up to fisking the entire book).

A more fundamentally anti-American book you won't find. Not surprisingly he, Sunstein, is one of Obama's top advisors and our 'Regulatory Czar'.

Capitalism vs Free Market?
 And finally, what do seemingly all of our educational and political 'leaders' say they are against? Capitalism, right? From the halls of wackademia to shores of 'Frisco bay, they will fight against capitalists and make them pay. But what is it? They tell us today that China is doing booming business under capitalism, really? That capitalism, which has produced the wealth and technology which they use to attack it, is more evil than good. Or that our corporations, who by the way have so many board members and advisers who are in or freshly out of govt  as to seem more like an NGO than a public corporation (Goldman-Sachs, GE, etc), as they greedily seek out favored govt contracts; we're told that these are representatives of capitalism? That capitalism hates the working man, minorities and likes nothing better than to keep people down and deprive them of their rights.

Really? What is it? Which is it? Is it even any of those?

The confusion comes in through the front door with the term 'Capitalism'. It might be helpful to remember that the term was first popularized (not coined by, but brought into common usage) by none other than Karl Marx, as a useful term for dispensing with the then current, and proper, term, the Free Market. But where the term Free Market tells you something descriptive about the system, the term 'Capitalism' doesn't, and it is so easily tossed around without any glaring conflict due to its name, and being so easily associated with every dark connotation of 'Money' (root of all evil, etc.), it serves nicely as a tool to lump in systems that are at odds, are total opposites, as well as all points in between, into a single stew of slurs (remember the NY Times article I mentioned above "Reason Seen More as Weapon Than Path to Truth"? This is an example of that).

What the usage of the term really winds up being in most people’s minds, is an all purpose reference to any system where financial transactions are allowed.

To put that in contrast, could you really, with a straight face, refer to the Communist Peoples Republic of China... as a Free Market? True, it does allow financial transactions to occur on a large scale, but are the owners of those businesses operating within that system free to make their own choices about what to manufacture? Sell? Hire? At what wages? Hours? Are they free from having to pay protection to political and crime (difference? There? Not much) figures? Massive regulation? Are they free to say what they think is true? Are they free to question their govt? How many of these businesses have govt as partners in their business? And so on.

A Free Market? China? Hardly.

Even Japan, though several orders of magnitude better than China, also cannot properly be called an actual Free Market, either legally, or culturally. Aside from the huge govt intervention present in their economy, business is done largely under palpable restrictions of who you know, who you are, who feels they can or should 'properly' let it be known that they know you and do business with you.

China may be riding high now, but I wouldn't bank on their remaining so high for so long, for many of the same reasons that Japan's economy (once thought to be buying up and economically enslaving America... anyone remember the 1980's? Remember the movie 'Red Sun'? Lol) crashed and has stagnated for more than a decade, and for many, many more reasons than what ended Japan's surge. My prediction is that China is going to crash, and crash hard... whether their military will be established enough to temporarily compensate for that is the real question, and one that should be keeping us up at night. BTW, my odd views on this got a nice boost a few weeks ago when I was reading the book "The Next 100 Years" by George Friedman of STRATFOR,

"The problem for China is political. China is held together by money, not ideology. When there is an economic downturn and the money stops rolling in, not only will the banking system spasm, but the entire fabric of Chinese society will shudder. Loyalty in China is either bought or coerced. Without available money, only coercion remains. Business slowdown can generally lead to instability because they lead to business failure and unemployment. In a country where poverty is endemic and unemployment widespread, the added pressure of an economic downturn will result in political instability." [pg 96]

An unfree market, may, seem to prosper, for a while... but it's only building with the bricks its taking from its own foundation, like a Ponzi scheme, it'll eventually crash and crash hard.

But anyway, back to the issue at hand, it was because of the philosophy of Natural Law, which slowly grew from the time of Homer, through Cicero, that forms the early foundations for the Free Market - but even at their height, the Greco-Roman worldview could not achieve a real Free Market, and so never rose above the horse & buggy age... not without the addition of Christianity and it's revolutionary insight that the individual, every individual, is worthwhile and that all souls are equal in value and importance. That idea, watered and tended so well, down through the ages to Aquinas and up through Locke, etc., developed into the realization that each person, by their nature as human beings, had Rights, and that none of those rights could be secured unless Property Rights were held sacrosanct.

That system has only been developed in the West. Hong Kong was one of the last hold outs of the view, which has been fading rapidly since the departure of British Rule.

So while other cultures may abound with markets where widespread financial transactions are permitted, they are not examples of Free Markets or of what is referred to as Capitalism. They may be more free than they were before, sure (China, btw, in centuries past, came the closest of any non-western society to developing a Free Market... but without that key ingredient, the value of the Individual, it quickly faltered and petered out), and a society which manages to attain more freedoms will produce more than it could with less freedom, but they cannot properly be called Free Markets or Capitalist.

They are called Capitalist by the tenured, and will be till the cows come home... being moonbats, whadya expect?

If you notice, all of this ties together:

• a respect for reality,
• honestly identifying what is and is not true, 
• revering the truth, recognizing that the nature of man is where he derives his rights from, 
• that those rights are defended in society through property rights, 
• that a Republic is designed to protect Property Rights (and through them all Rights) through its written laws and in accordance with Right Reason.

It all hangs together, doesn't it? And we all shall surely hang separately if we allow them to be severed. Which brings me to the last point:

Marxism, Communism, Socialism, Fascism, Progressivism...
What do they have in common? One thing, care to guess?

According to Marx,

" In this sense, the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property. "

, which is a fundamental tenet of every and all leftist ideologies, Marxism, Communism, Socialism, Fascism, Progressivism, and to the extent they succeed in tampering or destroying property rights, that is the extent which doom will follow close after them.

Do I really need to say anything more?