Individual Rights

In upcoming posts I will talk about ‘wealth redistribution’ and ‘the stimulus bill’. But before I do that I want to establish in greater detail the terms that are fundamental to any rational discussion on these topics.

Remember, facts are independent of one’s wishes or emotions. Not even one’s passions can alter the facts.

What makes this country so special and unique is the fact that the founders of this nation dared to challenge the long standing tradition which regarded the state as the supreme ruler of the individual. They founded this nation on the moral principles of individualism and independence. The founders gave us a constitutional government that protected the sanctity of the individual as a sovereign being.

Our natural rights, which are the only real rights of men, the right to life, the right to liberty, the right to earn and own property, and the right to pursue one’s own happiness are not separate and distinct entities but one inseparable unit. Destroy any one of these and you destroy man’s freedom.

These rights are not arbitrary. They are what is required for the survival of man and they support one very important fact of survival and that is man’s right to his own life. This right according to Samuel Adams is “self-preservation” which he calls the first law of nature. To quote John Dickinson, “These rights ‘are not annexed to us by parchments and seal. They are born with us; exist with us; and cannot be taken from us by any human power without taking our lives.”

To further quote Fredrick Bastiat, who said, “Life, liberty, and property do not exist because men have made laws. On the contrary, it was the fact that Life, liberty, and property existed beforehand that caused men to make laws in the first place.”

In the Declaration of Independence the founders made it clear, “That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among men, deriving there just powers from the consent of the governed.” However, the powers of government are not limited to the whims of majority opinion alone but are based in the principles that government is forbidden to infringe upon the rights of men. Samuel Adams wrote, “The grand end of civil government, from the very nature of its institution, is for the support, protection, and defense of those very rights.”

To clarify democracy’s limited role, Thomas Jefferson wrote that the will of the majority “to be rightful, must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal laws must protect, and to violate which would be oppression.”

Dr. Leonard Peikoff illuminated on this subject further when he wrote, “When the framers of the American republic spoke of “the people,” they did not mean a collectivist organism one part of which was authorized to consume the rest. They meant a sum of individuals, each of whom—whether strong or weak, rich or poor—retains his inviolate guarantee of individual rights.”-- “The Ominous Parallels”

Ayn Rand had an interesting perspective on the issue of Individual Rights:

“Individual rights are not subject to a public vote; a majority has no right to vote away the rights of a minority; the political function of rights is precisely to protect the minorities from oppression by majorities (and the smallest minority on earth is the individual).”

She also wrote, that “the basic premise of the Founding Fathers was man’s right to his own life, to his own liberty, to the pursuit of his own happiness—which means: man’s right to exist for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself; and that the political implementation of this right is a society where men deal with one another as traders, by voluntary exchange to mutual benefit.”

And one finale quote which I find particularly sobering: “But a Constitution of Government once changed from Freedom, can never be restored. Liberty, once lost, is lost forever.” John Adams

Lastly, the view the founders held of government was the state is the servant of the individual and not the sole agent of the collective. The constitution was therefore enacted to limit government to the protective role—protecting the rights of individuals.