The Bill of Rights is a literal and absolute document. The First Amendment doesn’t say you have a right to speak out unless the government has a ‘compelling interest’ in censoring the Internet. The Second Amendment doesn’t say you have the right to keep and bear arms until some madman plants a bomb. The Fourth Amendment doesn’t say you have the right to be secure from search and seizure unless some FBI agent thinks you fit the profile of a terrorist. The government has no right to interfere with any of these freedoms under any circumstances.
Category: rights
After Niemoller
When they took the 4th Amendment, I was quiet because I didn’t deal drugs. When they took the 6th Amendment, I was quiet because I was innocent. When they took the 2nd Amendment, I was quiet because I didn’t own a gun. Now they have taken the 1st Amendment, and I can only be quiet.
Your rights
You have rights antecedent to all earthly governments; rights that cannot be repealed or restrained by human laws; rights derived from the Great Legislator of the Universe.
Collective rights
If every person has the right to defend — even by force — his person, his liberty, and his property, then it follows that a group of men have the right to organize and support a common force to protect these rights constantly. Thus the principle of collective right — its reason for existing, its lawfulness — is based on individual right. And the common force that protects this collective right cannot logically have any other purpose or any other mission than that for which it acts as a substitute. Thus, since an individual cannot lawfully use force against the person, liberty, or property of another individual, then the common force — for the same reason — cannot lawfully be used to destroy the person, liberty, or property of individuals or groups.
The myth of limitless government
How should it happen that the individual should be without rights, but the combination of individuals should possess unlimited rights?
Property rights
True liberty cannot exist apart from the full rights of property, for property is the only crystallized form of free faculties … The whole meaning of socialism is a systematic glorification of force … No literary phrases about social organisms are potent enough to evaporate the individual, who is the prime, indispensable, irreducible element.
You must have rights to have citizens
Any time we deny any citizen the full exercise of his constitutional rights, we are weakening our own claim to them.
Initiation of force
All initiation of force is a violation of someone else’s rights, whether initiated by an individual or the state, for the benefit of an individual or group of individuals, even if it’s supposed to be for the benefit of another individual or group of individuals.