Your Monday morning freedom thoughts are brought to you by Stephen L. Hall.
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Continuing the concepts from previous posts, language is the basis of every culture, it is what binds people together. In the Federalist Papers, one of the reasons argued as to why our colonies should come together as one country is the fact that we speak a common language. The essential cornerstone of civilized society is that it is comprised by men of moral reason who debate issues and principles rather than establishing arbitrary and capricious rules. In a moral society, words must have meaning.
Those who seek to undermine the language seek to destroy the fabric of society itself. While that is the reason political correctness is so quintessentially evil, of more pressing concern is the corruption of certain words which form the very basis of our republic.
While the uniqueness of our Constitution lies in its construction as a document of enumerated powers, meaning that the government only has that authority specifically granted it; the Constitution is most famous for its Bill of Rights. A “bill” is simply another way to say a list, so it is merely a list of rights.
But what is a right?
The word “right” actually has many different meanings, which readily lends itself to much humor referring to right as opposed to left, right as correct, and right as a legal concept. It is the latter which is obviously referred to in our list of rights, but even then it is generally misunderstood or understood only vaguely and loosely.
It is the intentional misuse of the word “right” which drives many a socialist agenda and has been fraudulently weaponized to attack and malign American tradition, culture, and philosophy. Until such time as conservatives learn the actual meaning of the word “right”, how it is abused by socialists, and how to support and uphold the language, they will continue to give ground to their intellectual enemies.
The definition of a right is simple, but important. It literally defines public issues as who is on the perceived correct side of an issue. To oppose anything someone else has called a “right” is to immediately become the tyrant, the oppressor trying to take away someone’s “rights”. The immediate emotional reaction is to leap to the defense of the oppressed, and most people, most voters, most citizens react emotionally, no matter how much the intellectual strains to deny it.
A right is a prohibition against government interference.
A person never has a right to something, only a right to be free from government actions restraining them. For example, a person has a right to free speech, they do not have a right to speak freely. In other words, while the government cannot prohibit your expressions, no one is ever under an obligation to provide you a forum or platform from which to speak.
Lest you think that this is just my personal perspective or definition, let us take a minute to look at how the founding fathers expressed some of our most fundamental rights. “Congress shall make no law . . . .” 1st Amendment. “. . . shall not be infringed.” 2nd Amendment. “No Soldier shall . . . .” 3rd Amendment. “. . . against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated . . . .” 4th Amendment. “No person shall be held to answer . . .; nor shall any person be subject . . .; nor be deprived . . .; nor shall private property be taken . . .” 5th Amendment. “Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.” 8th Amendment.
In fairness, the 6th and 7th Amendments refer to people having a “right to”, which appears to contradict the principle that a person never has a right to something, only a right to be free from interference. However, if you examine those Amendments closely, they are also restrictions on government process preventing the government from interfering with individual liberty. Even the founding fathers were not as precise in their use of the word “right” as the subject truly merits.
It is a limitation on government authority. As such, people often confuse actions of private companies with actions of a government, particularly big companies. An argument can be made that certain companies which get legal and regulatory support from the government are acting in loco republicae, in place of republic, such as broadcast radio and television networks granted licenses and semi-monopolies by the FCC.
Certainly, the nationalization of the education industry makes actions of public schools actions of the government, so the argument that prayer in schools is an establishment of religion gains ground far from what was ever intended by the founding fathers.
“To know thy enemy is to know thyself.” Hamlet. This background has just been a foundation to address three of the most devastatingly deceitful abuses of the word “right” in modern socialist propaganda. If you understand how the word is misused, you can counter it when it is so abused.
Leftist pseudo-intellectuals have manufactured the concept of negative versus positive “rights”. In a not subtle ploy, they label every one of the rights listed in the Constitution as “negative”. They pretend that is merely because these rights are prohibitory that they cast them as negative, but honestly, the purpose of the word “negative” is to create an emotional reaction against the rights themselves.
It is not an accident that people have developed an actual aversion to traditional rights such as the right to keep and bear arms or free speech without limits. Associating the emotion of negative in young minds, and highlighting every bad aspect of those rights, rears a generation which accepts notions that such rights are outdated and should be limited in our modern society.
Meanwhile, they have attached the word “positive” to the word “right” to describe that which is neither positive nor a right. Positive rights violate the definition just discussed. Instead the phrase implies exactly the opposite, that a person has a right to something. For example, the WV State Constitution states that people have a right to a free public education.
A “right” to education, a “right” to health care, a civil “right” to not be discriminated against, a “right” to the internet; are all variants of the concept of “positive rights”. All of them demand government action to put into effect, which is how the left can pretend that they are “positive” because instead of prohibiting government actions they demand government intervention.
There is another common necessary connection to the so-called positive rights which is what really makes them the horrid fraud that they are. Every positive right demands compulsion by the government upon the actions of other citizens, and not just a demand from government like they pretend.
How may anyone have a right to education or health care or employment? The pretense is that the government will be compelled to provide it by spending money to purchase such services. The most common criticism of such government ran and funded programs is that a lack of sufficient money and labor will invariably lead to shortages and rationing, which is true on a practical level, alas does not address the philosophical problem at its core.
But suppose, just to illustrate the essence, that no matter how much money the government offers, no one is willing to provide the services. If you have a right to health care and there are no doctors, then what could such a right actually mean? If you have that right, then the government is obligated to provide it, even if it has to force people to be doctors and nurses so that the health care is available.
Ideologically, every “positive right” can mathematically be reduced down to a situation where the government compels one citizen to provide the service or commodity to the one possessing the “right”. A “positive right” is an absolute demand by one citizen upon the labor and property of another.
“Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude . . . shall exist within the United States . . . .” 13th Amendment, section 1. But “positive rights” is involuntary servitude, it is slavery, and you have a “negative” right prohibiting the government from granting such a “positive right” to your fellow citizen.
There is one other aspect of rights which is of paramount importance in modern political discussions, and that is the question of who actually has rights. Proving that we live in a republic and not a democracy is easily accomplished by asking people what rights a minority has in a democracy. However, such a question is inherently flawed, even though I asked it.
A right is always and only a property or attribute of the individual. A group can never have rights. There can never exist such a phenomena as “minority rights”, “homosexual rights”, “women’s rights”, “workers’ rights”, or any other group which one would care to imagine.
Go back to the definition of a right as a restriction on government interference; it is only with the actions of the individual which can be interfered. Interference is an action. There must be an object or person to be acted upon. A group cannot be acted upon. A group may be influenced only by affecting the behavior of the individuals within that group, but never the entire group itself.
Just as a tax can only be paid by an individual, a right can only be possessed by an individual. People imagine a corporation being taxed, but that tax gets distributed among shareholders, customers, and workers. But a corporation is a legal fiction, the tax is born by actual individuals.
The language of “group rights” are a fiction designed to get people to identify with groups. It is a divide-and-conquer strategy to divide people one against the other. Just as “positive” rights promote the demand for more government, and the coercive power need to enforce such entitlement, the collective nature of such “rights” promotes division and fracturing of society. It makes people easier to control if they are too busy fighting each other for their fair share of “rights”.
Rights are your possession as an individual. Rights are never collective. Rights are never positive. Rights are never coercive. I will defend your rights because if we lose the concept, the definition, of right; then the very concept of rights will cease to exist. I defend your rights to preserve my own.
