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By Root 789 0

and freedoms existed before governments are formed, or as French lawyer Frédéric Bastiat stated in 1850, “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.” This is a far cry from the mainstream view of rights and liberties in America today; but wasn’t Locke’s theory the foundational theory upon which America was created in the first place? It seems modern American thought has replaced the theory that the only just role of government is to protect our natural rights, with a theory that the role of government is to give us our rights. How can the government give us what it does not have? What path has this led us down? Does the individual have the right to live his own life as he wishes anymore? It actually seems that some tyrannical central government has assumed this role for him, all supposedly in the best interests of the general welfare, of course.

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You Cannot Purchase Rights from Wal-Mart!

It is very important to understand what a right is, especially since Big Government progressives in both the Democratic and the Republican Parties have been trying to trick us. These folks, who really want the government to care for us from cradle to grave, have been promoting the idea that some goods are rights. In promoting that false premise, they have succeeded in moving the debate from whether the feds should micro-manage our lives to how the feds should micro-manage our lives. This is a false premise, and we should reject it.

What is a right? A right is a gift from God that extends from our humanity. Thinkers from St. Augustine to St. Thomas Aquinas, from St. Thomas More to Thomas Jefferson, from the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to Pope John Paul II to Justice Clarence Thomas, have all argued that our rights are a natural part of our humanity. We own our bodies; thus, we own the gifts that emanate from our bodies. So, our right to life, our right to develop our personalities, our right to think as we wish, to say what we think, to publish what we say, our right to worship or not worship, our right to travel, to defend ourselves, to use our own property as we see fit, our right to due process—fairness—from the government, and our right to be left alone, are all rights that stem from our humanity. These are natural rights that we are born with. The government doesn’t give them to us, and the government doesn’t pay for them, and the government can’t take them away, unless a jury finds that we have violated someone else’s rights.

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John Locke advanced our understanding of Natural Rights with his theory which explained what humans were naturally able to do in the perfectly free state of nature. In this state, humans were free to order their own actions, exercise their free will, employ their own person, and acquire and dispose of their own possessions. The state of nature (human existence without government and without the need for government) was also a state of equality; where no one’s rights were subordinate to any others’ rights. Thus, no person has the right to tell another person how to order his life, and no human may impose his will forcibly or coercively to deprive another human of his free will.

More generally, a right involves a sphere within which we are free to make our own decisions without any interference from the government, individuals, or entities. Just as we gain personal property when we mix our labor with nature to allocate food to ourselves, we then gain the right to be the sole decider of what to do with that property. From this it follows we should also be the sole decider of what to do with all of the other emanations from our bodies. If government were to regulate any of our rights, we would lose our personhood. Rights ensure such a result will not happen.

What is a good? Locke also spoke of humans as animals who naturally need to acquire property. Goods are those “things” we want or need as humans. In a sense, a good is the opposite of