Right Online: Live coverage at C-SPAN

Loved the speech, Ed. Unalienable Rights is one of my favorite subjects of discussion… and, as Americans, we don’t talk about it nearly often enough. You gave an impassioned commentary, so much so that you literally paced your way out of the shot at one point :), but I can’t blame you… the subject is deserving of passion.

Liberals seem to believe that rights can be arbitrarily defined in Washington, that there should be no conflict between the “negative rights” our founders guaranteed in the U.S. Constitution and the “positive rights” they’d like to invent. They don’t understand that these two conditions cannot coexist, that to allow confiscatory government policy does NOT impinge upon the rights of just some of us, but of all.

The founders knew that what a government can give TO it’s citizens, it can certainly take away FROM them. They’d seen it firsthand. And so they designed a form of government in which ‘We the People’ would be sovereign, with no king, no tyrant above us. Each of us are endowed with certain unalienable rights, natural rights, recognized in observance of our humanity. As human beings, we can speak, therefore we have a right to. We can make weapons, so we have the right to keep them. Because we’re human animals, we’re clever enough to produce and defend what is needed to perpetuate our own survival, so we have the right to do that, to make and keep our own property.

What we don’t have the right to do, is to impede another citizen from the exercise of HIS natural rights. To do so would be to rise above the sovereign citizen and to tyrannize him as if we were a king, a usurpation of power. And as we tear our fellow citizen down, depriving him of his sovereignty… we do the same to ourselves! We are no longer our own king, because we’ve abdicated our own right to sovereignty by depriving our fellow sovereign citizen. The vacuum is then filled by what few can rise by right of might.

Certainly, things like healthcare and education for all citizens are laudable goals for a benevolent society. But, we don’t have to throw the baby out with the bathwater in order to accomplish them. We don’t have to walk away from the founding principles or trash our Constitution.

Physicists ask very basic questions in order to provide us with complex answers… “Why does the apple fall from the tree? Why doesn’t it float or move sideways?” And from a simple question like that, we discover gravity.

Simple questions, like “Why did the founders choose to list property rights as the first mention of rights in the U.S. Constitution? can lead us to complex answers while we’re dealing with subjects like healthcare.

Great speech, Ed. :)

Murf76 on August 15, 2009 at 11:59 AM