Rights

“To deny people their human rights is to challenge their very humanity” ~Nelson Mandala

There’s no such thing as women’s rights or handicapped rights, gay rights or elderly rights, LGBTXYZ rights, or minority rights of any kind. There are only human rights—and we’re all human. To believe that rights depend on a social distinction is to believe that rights are not equal for everyone. It’s to believe that if you are randomly born a woman you have rights that men don’t. We all have the exact same rights: the right to our life, our body, our labor, and the wealth they create. We have the right to exercise our free will as sentient human beings. Those trying to erroneously divide rights up into ideological party joints to be passed around the room are trying to get society high on victimization so they won’t notice them working the politicians over for special legal privilege, “legal rights.” They want “laws” passed and enforced on everyone that give them special consideration in society, at work and, of course, more money and feigned respect. They are the cultural Marxists who march topless in the streets or dressed as vaginas shouting “equality” and “compassion” while pursuing privilege with force. I don’t think “equality” and “compassion” mean what they think it means.

There’s no such thing as a “legal right,” it’s an oxymoron like “Free State” or “Sovereign Citizen.” It’s government doublespeak meant to obscure and distort the meaning of the concept and excuse what the State does. They’re trying to convince you that they have the right to do something that they do not. Whenever the State wants to do something that violates the rights of others, they just write some new “laws” and claim the “legal right” to do it. How convenient.

But rights do not come from the government and their “laws” or from a constitution. Government judges do not determine the rights of others, how can they? That would imply that judges have rights the rest of us don’t, they do not. If rights were to come from the State then they wouldn’t be rights at all but privileges. Privileges can be taken away, rights cannot. Slaves are given privileges by their masters, free people are not. Individuals have rights, strawmen do not. “The State” has no rights, “The People” has no rights, “Uncle Sam” isn’t real and has no rights. They are political aberrations magically conjured into existence like a five-thousand-year-old Egyptian priestess, anthropomorphized in order to facilitate the implementation of the government’s nefarious ways. “The State” magically turns rights into privileges and punishes those who abuse the privileges the State was so kind to give them. Don’t be angry about the privileges the State has given you, be thankful for what the State hasn’t done to you yet.

Human rights come from our humanity, our reason, rational thought, logic, common sense, and our conscience. Economically, we reason that we’re better off as individuals if we acknowledge and respect the property rights of others and trade with them rather than if we engage in perpetual war. We can engage in invention and innovation working together peacefully. We can progress as a society and achieve things that were previously thought unachievable. Individuals learned how to fly and invented the light bulb, the internal combustion engine, and the semiconductor. They did this by voluntarily working together not because of government imposed “legal rights” but despite them. Empathetically our conscience punishes us with guilt when we violate the rights of others. That’s why the truth is so liberating, it lifts the burden of guilt from a person’s conscience. Emotionally we understand we’re better off as individuals if we acknowledge and respect those rights.

Human rights are natural and unalienable and they begin with self-ownership and self-determination. Rights are those things which require consent on the part of the individual: the right to one’s body and life and free will. Each individual has the right to determine what they do with their body, their life, and what path they take; they require no one’s permission to exist, to live, to pursue whatever they want in life. Everyone has the right to put anything in their body they want, tattoo it, pierce it, mutilate it, or even end it. They have the right to sell their body, their labor, and their skills to the highest bidder for money. They have the right to use that money for anything they want—even sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Anyone telling you otherwise and using force to violate those rights is committing a crime regardless of who it is. If it’s wrong for you to do it then it’s wrong for everyone to do it, rights are not conditional.

Human rights are objective, they are the same for everyone. Find even one person on the planet who doesn't assert that their consent is required for sex with them. Even one person who doesn't believe in self-ownership and the right to self-determination from which all other rights originate. From which all human interactions, all production, all trade arises. I'll be waiting over here because that person doesn’t exist. Even the mentally handicapped fight back when attacked. Why, if they don’t instinctually know they have a right to their body and their life?

The acknowledgement of and respect for rights are the foundation of all human relationships both personal and economic. Without property rights there’d be no production, no trade, no innovation, no invention. Why incur the costs and risks of being productive when you can just take what you want from those smaller and weaker since they have no rights to it in the first place? But although there are some in any society who will violate the rights of others, i.e., the criminals, the overwhelming majority of the world are civilized, moral people going to work every day because they acknowledge and respect the rights of others and their employer. Otherwise, why would they go to work? Why would anyone pay for something at the store if they didn’t acknowledge and respect the store owner’s right to it?

A civilized man acknowledges and respects the rights of others. An uncivilized man violates the rights of others. He's called a criminal. The former facilitates production and trade and peace and the latter allows us to identify who the criminals are and weed them out. The existence of rights doesn't preclude crime, it in fact defines it. A crime is the intentional violation of a right, a wrong. Taking something that doesn’t belong to you without the owner’s permission regardless of who the perpetrator is, regardless of who he works for, regardless of what he’s been told or what he believes. Government “laws” and their pretty little badges don’t magically create rights the rest of us don’t have, they don’t turn a wrong into a right, they don’t justify “legalized crime.” Rinse and repeat.