Where Do Individual Rights Come From?

Mark Levin's new "conservative manifesto," Liberty and Tyranny, has become a big best-seller as Americans have sought intellectual ammunition to oppose the Administration's attempt, in President Obama's own words, to "transform America."

Exactly what he wished to change, Mr. Obama never made perfectly clear in his many campaign speeches.  And while some Americans may still be a little confused about what this President intends to do, a look at the latest poll of likely voters suggests a majority of Americans have nonetheless concluded that the Obama Administration poses an existential threat to their right to make their own judgment about what doctor they wish to see, what sort of health care they want, how they wish to run their lives.

There is a reason why Tea Party protesters held up signs reading, "Leave Us Alone."

Americans understand, in short, that President Obama believes government should control the people, even if doing so means forcing upon them laws they oppose by large margins.  The President should be given credit of a sort for his moral, if not his rhetorical, consistency.

For implicit in Mr. Obama's political ideology is a theory of ethics widely applauded by today's intellectual, academic, and media elites, namely, the belief that rights are a gift of society.  Thus Obama's political system subordinates an individual's "right" only to that freedom of action "society" decides he should exercise.

As there is no such entity as "society," since society is only a number of individual people, this system means, in practice, whichever political gang controls the executive and legislative powers decides what "rights" Americans get to exercise.

"Rights" are a moral concept--the concept that provides a logical transition from the principles guiding an individual's actions to the principles guiding his relationship with others.  The concept of individual rights is the means of subordinating society to moral law.

Since every political system is based on some code of ethics, the key to understanding the scope and nature of such a system lay in the degree to which individual rights are recognized and protected.

Clearly, any system that subordinates the individual to some higher authority, either mystical or social, places that higher authority outside the moral law.  "The Divine Right of Kings" summarizes the political theory of the first; "The Voice of the People is the Voice of God" summarizes the second.  The common characteristic of either code of ethics is the fact that society stands above the moral law, as an omnipotent, sovereign, arbitrary power exercised without restraint and according to the whims of whoever becomes the ruler.

When the "conservative" Mr. Levin offers, in opposition to the social theory of ethics, one founded on mysticism, he does not seem to be aware that his theory does not support the concept of inalienable individual rights, but undermines them at the most fundamental level.

So finally we come to the opening question, "Where do individual rights come from?"

The source of rights is man's nature.

While the Declaration of Independence states that men "are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights," whether one believes that man is the product of a Creator or of nature, the issue of man's origin does not change the fact that he is a being of a specific kind--a rational being--and that he cannot function successfully under coercion.  Individual rights are the necessary condition of his particular mode of survival.

The Declaration laid down the principle that "to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men."  This principle provides the only valid justification for government and defines its only valid purpose:  to protect man's rights by protecting him from physical violence.

The Founding Fathers thus changed the role of government from ruler to servant.

Government protects people from criminals; the Constitution protects people from government.  For about a hundred and fifty years the United States of America came close to achieving a civilized society, one in which physical force was banned from human relationships, in which government, acting as a policeman, used force only in retaliation and only against those who initiated its use.

Unfortunately that is no longer the case.  Everywhere we turn Americans today are fearful of their government, and alarmed by its gross incompetence in protecting them from enemies, foreign and domestic.

Americans fear that the Obama Administration seeks to become their ruler, rather than their servant.

And they have cause to be alarmed.  Very alarmed.

While the rise of the Tea Party movement suggests that radical change may lay in the near future, Americans will be able to reconstitute their government only if they work together. 

That means, above, all, they must get their ideological house in order, understand the principles of limited government, and act boldly and wisely.

Tom Anderson
January 2010

Invitation to Defend Rights Now

Defend Rights Now supports individual rights in all areas of society, from defense of Americans on the national and international level, to the individual right to self-defense, not only against government, but against criminals.

The two areas are, of course, intimately connected. When Americans speak out about their Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms, they speak both of the people's check on the power of the federal, state, and local governments, and the people's right to defend their lives and their property against local thugs and criminals who attempt to prey upon them.

The Founders wrote the Constitution to protect the people from government, to create a political system where government became the servant of the people, not their ruler.  That effort resulted in a pattern of civilized society in which--for the brief span of some hundred and fifty years--physical force was banned from human relationships. 

The concept of individual rights gave birth to a free society, so it is with the destruction of individual rights modern enemies of freedom must begin, and they have been working hard to accomplish just this goal since the beginning of the New Deal in the 1930s.

Defend Rights Now defends and promotes individual rights within this larger political context of national politics and culture.

To violate an individual's rights means to compel him to act against his own judgment, or to expropriate his values, and basically there is only one way to do it:  by using physical force.  Potentially there are only two violators of individual rights:  the criminals and the government.  The great achievement of the United States was to distinguish between the two--by forbidding to the second the legalized version of the first.

The enemies of freedom work daily in the news media, in the political parties, in colleges and universities--in government--to corrupt this distinction ideologically and politically.  Defend Rights Now investigates this corruption and helps provide the ideological tools required to combat it.

Defend Rights Now, in guarding the individual's right to act on his or her own judgment, seeks to help people not only to protect themselves from government, but to suggest situations and techniques in which women, in particular, can protect themselves against personal assault from criminals.

Psychological studies suggest people tend to believe they are less responsible for events that occur in their lives when those events happen outside their immediate control.  Yet a person letting "things just happen" may through such bias indirectly cause those events as if she took active steps to put herself in danger.

For example, when a women pulls into a parking garage, parks, then gathers up her purse, perhaps a briefcase, her cell phone, her keys, probably the very last thing she is thinking about is the possibility of a man just hidden out of her sight, waiting for the opportunity to knock her down, steal her pocket book, her personal computer, or, even worse, assault her sexually.

When a woman trains herself to become more aware of her immediate surroundings as she goes about her daily activities, she acts to protect herself in the most effective way she can.  

If she carries with her at all times some form of non-lethal self-defense weapon, such as a Pepper Spray or Stun Gun, she greatly enhances her ability to protect herself and any children who may accompany her.

Time and time again, the use of such non-lethal devices has proven to be an effective means of self-defense against personal assault, and in the hands of police, an effective, non-lethal alternative to deadly force in many situations.

That these self-defense weapons do not use deadly force means a person doesn't face the possibility that she could actually kill another human being.

For those who wish to enhance their ability to defend themselves from criminal assault, Defend Rights Now provides links to JustStunGuns, an internet store offering the widest range of effective, but non-lethal, self-defense tools currently available, as well as information about their safe and legal use.

To help people become more aware of common situations in which they would enhance their ability to defend themselves from personal or criminal assault, Defend Rights Now links to news stories where those situations arise and explores how people might use such self-defense weapons most effectively.

Defend Rights Now welcomes reader comments, suggestions, and questions.

Tom Anderson
January 2010

American Thinker: Health Care and Our Inalienable Rights

With threats from federal officials to seize control over the health care system and further intrude into our private matters, many Americans are trying to find ways to protect their lives and liberty. Given America's dysfunctional economic situation that the federal government caused and has been making worse, government can only make the health care system go from dysfunctional to despotic. The regulations, mandates, and restrictions currently in place already violate the individual citizen's God-given, inalienable natural rights to "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness" referred to in the Declaration of Independence.

The Current Situation

On the theory that somebody somewhere has to start acknowledging that the emperor has no clothes, I submit the following letter of protest I sent to my Congressman and Senators. If you feel as I do, even in part, I urge you to consider writing to your Representative and your Senators. If you need a template, please feel free to use any part or all of this letter to express your feelings and beliefs.

There is some urgency here. Let me remind you that "cap-and-trade" goes to a vote this Friday, which the President has promised will cause your electrical rates to "skyrocket." We also have upcoming legislation that will further remove health care from any semblance of individual control, where ever greater power will be bestowed upon government officials to determine what care you have permission to receive, how you will receive it, who will be able to offer it, or whether you will even get it.

Remember folks, this is your life Congress proposes to reconstruct, these are your liberties that it proposes to abridge, this is a once great and special country that Congress proposes to change into a European-style socialist state, unless you call on your government to face the fact that you are not a sheep but a freedom-loving, independent, American citizen who is perfectly capable of guiding your own life without the help of faceless government officials meddling in every decision you want to make.

Recall the words of one of our Founders, Benjamin Franklin: "Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote."

Dear Congressman Young,

Never in my life have I ever been so angry, appalled, and, quite frankly, so shocked at the idiotic legislation Congress has been passing since the Fall of 2008, with more of the same in 2009, and no end in sight.

My sense is that most members of Congress believe they operate in an alternative universe where the ordinary laws of physics have been suspended. I recall a funny story I read where some state legislature tried to pass a law to redefine the mathematical number known as pi. Pi, if you recall from your high school days, cannot have an exact value, mathematicians approximating it by rounding to whatever decimal place they need for a particular set of calculations, which is why, incidentally, mathematicians use the Greek letter to represent it in the first place.

Whether through sheer ignorance or simple stupidity and arrogance, today's Congress (along with the President) act as if the ordinary laws of supply and demand can be repealed by wishing it were so. They monetize the national debt and expect sound money; they increase taxes and expect people to work harder for less and less; at every turn they pass laws that hobble the people from supporting themselves and expect a nation of strong free and independent Americans rather than a nation of sheep.

No, I am wrong. They expect no such thing, Congressman. They want a nation of sheep: sheep can't defend themselves and have no concepts of any kind, much less an understanding of man's rights as the means by which the people subordinate government power to moral law.

There is a reason, Congressmen, why Americans are buying arms and ammunition at unprecedented levels. There is a reason why Americans are forming Tea Parties, to hearken back to another generation of Americans who refused to accept a relatively minor tax imposed upon them without their consent.

I wonder if the current crop of Washington politicians would even understand that George Orwell's great novel, Animal Farm, is a fable, and at some point the people will wake up to the fact that Congress and the President and the Supreme Court are the pigs? We are talking revolution here, Congressman. We are heading toward a second Constitutional Convention, if that is what it takes to save ourselves from this unprecedented onslaught of irrational and unjust laws.

It is clear as a bell that Congress and the President believe people are incompetent to run their own affairs and they see themselves as far more competent, for that is the only way they can justify the use of force--the taxing power--to compel what they cannot accomplish through voluntary exchange. Their arrogance over the decades has reached such a point of utter corruption and disregard for the people's liberties that they feel it unnecessary even to read the laws they pass.

This President has shown himself to be highly gifted in packaging this power grab over the people's liberties and property, but the people are, I believe, beginning to see beyond the splendid packaging and they don't like what they see.

I am writing to tell you, Congressman, we are not sheep and treating Americans as if they were incompetent, stupid, directionless and dependent will only inspire greater anger and fury.

Obama promised Americans "change we can believe in." What he and the Congress have given us is more of the same failed tax-and-spend policies that have created the mess we face today. Bush and the Republicans simply expanded government while they were in office, so my words go to their actions with just as much outrage, perhaps more, since they of all people should have known better. One may debate how many months Americans should be forced during a calendar year to work for the government, but where is the leader, the politician, the statesman who will stand up to power and say: "Enough"?

So I face the question, Congressman, the same question millions of independent, liberty-loving Americans will ask themselves come the next Congressional election: Which candidate will support my right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness? Which candidate merely talks a good game but will return to Congress and promptly vote to increase my burden of taxation and regulation?

I struggle to hope that Congress is just stupid, arrogant, and incompetent, for the alternative is to believe its members are consciously malevolent and anti-American. Or am I missing something here?

Tom Anderson

June 2009

Who Speaks for the Right?

As to the financial meltdown:

The essential problem with the sub-prime loans was that the market value of the underlying asset could not be sustained forever on the willingness of buyers to pay ever higher prices, on the assumption that prices would continue to rise.

Why did investors and lenders operate on the assumption that market prices for housing would continue to rise?

So long as Freddie and Fannie would buy the loans without verifying the ability of mortgagors to pay them off with current income or other assets, there was no incentive to perform due diligence, to verify income, no need to require a down-payment.

Where were the normal checks of free-market capitalism? Does anyone actually believe lenders would behave the way they've behaved during the real-estate boom, if they did not have two government agencies willing to buy whatever was offered? Asked in another way, how many lenders do you suppose would write no-money down deals without verifying income if they were to keep such loans in their own portfolios?

Who is the politician who can make this clear and defend capitalism?


As to the Republicans:

The Republicans lost for a lot of very good and understandable reasons. First and foremost, Republicans have given Americans some very bad government recently. Yes, there were some Republicans, including President Bush, who posted warnings. But what did Republicans do?

The principal disaster of the Bush Administration was the overwhelming and unaccountable failure to exercise leadership, to give an articulate voice for those Americans who believe the United States government is a government of limited powers delegated to it by the states and by the people, and that government is best that tries to perform its specific constitutional duties of providing for the common defense, rather than "reform" society according to the latest and best theories put forth by the liberal social engineers that constitute the Democratic Party.

The other disaster of the Bush Administration was its spending public money recklessly, extravagantly, and with utter disregard and contempt for the idea of limited government. Not once did the Bush Administration even threaten to veto Congressional approved spending bills, at least while Republicans ran the House and Senate.

One has to ask, as I did while the Bush Administration's basic trajectory was becoming clear, where is the political constituency for the big government Bush advocated? Social conservatives, economic libertarians and national defense hawks form the basis of the current Republican Party and Bush sought to appeal only to Social Conservatives and hawks. If any proof were needed of the importance of economic philosophy to a party's electoral success, we have it here.

Over the years of the Bush Administration I have spoken with many ordinary Republicans who became appalled by Bush's spend-without-consequence philosophy. It is rather difficult now, to oppose the spending plans of Mr. Obama, whatever they may be, because Republicans, under Mr. Bush, have completely and totally surrendered the tax issue, a marker for smaller, more limited government, to Obama and the Democrats, who promised a tax break to 95% of all Americans.

The American people may be mistaken to trust Obama and the Democrats with the responsibility of creating smaller and more effective government, but electing Obama was the only way to rid the country of the despised Republicans whose nominee only national defense hawks could respect, who went out of his way to insult social conservatives, and demonstrated complete contempt for economics by declaring he didn't know anything about the subject.

Even then he managed to get 46% of the vote. What would have happened had a candidate of the Right been the nominee, a candidate who was pro-life, pro-national defense, and pro-laissez-faire?

He (or she) would have won.

Tom Anderson

December 2008

Republican Postmortem

When Reagan was elected president in 1980, he put together a coalition of (for want of better terms) Christian fundamentalists, economic libertarians, and national-security conservatives. A future Republican electoral success cannot pretend the economic libertarian leg of this coalition does not exist.

The current president, because of the Iraq War, because of his tax policies, and because he successfully energized social conservatives by invoking their fear and contempt for homosexuals, managed an electoral success in 2004, a success that unraveled in 2006 with the Democratic victory in the House and Senate, largely over Bush's grotesque incompetence in executing the War, although Bush's extravagant and irresponsible spending policies and the political corruption of so many Republican politicians played a role.

Libertarians in this coalition had no candidate in the 2008 election. As a libertarian myself I still pulled the lever for McCain, but that was simply a vote against Obama. Why? It was virtually impossible to make a positive intellectual case for McCain. McCain knows nothing of economics it seems and he apparently feels embarrassed by social conservatives. Frankly, I am impressed that he received as many votes as he did.

McCain and the Republicans actually lost the tax issue to the Democrats in 2008, having ceded it to Obama's now famous "95% tax cut" rhetoric.

As a libertarian I come to the issues that energize social conservatives from a different point of view than they.

I seek limited government and quite frankly I could care less what anybody does in the bedroom or what they do with their bodies. Individual human beings, in my thinking, "own" their own bodies and lives and should have their natural rights recognized and respected by the law.

Unfortunately, on such issues as a woman's right to choose, the right of individuals to form a marriage contract, and the right to consume whatever they wish in the nature of foods, medicines, drugs, etc., are subjects about which social conservatives and libertarians will disagree profoundly.

As a libertarian I ask myself how could I possibly ally myself with people who believe they have moral right to deprive me of my right to life, that is, my right to live my life the way I want to, so long as I respect the equal rights of others?

Let's be clear. The only reason to do so is because the collectivists on the Left are even worse in their disrespect for individual rights than are the social conservatives on the Right.

Social conservatives, if they value their economic freedom and want to have a chance at future electoral victory, might consider showing a little more respect for the economic libertarians that made up the original Reagan coalition.

On the other hand, it is possible libertarians may be able to forge some sort of coalition with voters who have voted Democratic in recent elections but who have no stomach for socialism.

Until and unless social conservatives realize that the libertarian leg is as disgusted with religion-based governmental intervention into a person's most personal and private life, as they are with the libertarian commitment to individualism, the Republican Party will not be able to reclaim Reagan's authority and Reagan's active belief that the only justifiable purpose of government is the protection of individual rights.

Tom Anderson

November 2008

Mr. Obama's Socialism

It sounds strange to hear Mr. Obama promote lowering taxes, for example, when he also advocates "spreading the wealth" as a form of "neighborliness." Mr. Obama and his followers go to some length to avoid identifying themselves as advocating the political and economic philosophy of socialism, but he let his rhetorical guard down when he told Joe the Plumber on national news that "spreading the wealth" around is precisely what his policies will seek to do.

Today's political discourse makes determining what might be called the political philosophy of the current crop of Presidential candidates difficult to understand, for as candidate Obama has said, "words mean things."

In a Presidential contest where the Republican candidate demonstrated some knowledge and understanding of capitalism, Mr. Obama's verbal slip would have been seized and used to great political advantage.

Unfortunately, today's Republican Party shows all the marks of an institution that has lost its way, and proof is found in the candidacy of John McCain.

What have we come to when supporters of limited government, lower taxes, reduced government expenditure and protection of individual rights might actually believe that Mr. Obama would be the better choice?

Mr. Obama campaigns on a pledge to reduce the taxes on 95% of all Americans; only those making more than $250 thousand annually will be subject to having an increased percentage of their earnings confiscated by the government in the form of increased taxes, to be redistributed by Mr. Obama to those citizens he believes merit the fruits of other people's labor.

Since all Americans do not pay income taxes, Mr. Obama's proposal will, in fact, provide "welfare checks" (i.e., "tax credits") to a lot of Americans, further blurring the moral distinction between money we earn and money that is given to us by having government first take it from others. We will be asked to view Mr. Obama's robbing Peter to pay Paul as a form of economic "fairness." A simpler notion of what socialism means could hardly be described.

Do Americans really want a government that has the power and inclination to rob some citizens for the unearned benefit of others? McCain has certainly made the point, all too briefly, during the last Presidential Debate, that Obama's tax policies will engender a renewed sense of "class warfare," but how many Americans really understand what McCain is talking about?

Obama makes the point that the McCain candidacy is merely an extension of Bush Administration policies. McCain retorts that he has opposed Bush any number of times on important legislation and, most particularly, in arguing for changing the military strategy in Iraq.

But is there a philosophical thread that runs through the McCain proposals, as there is in Obama's proposals?

McCain's responsibility as a Presidential candidate is to provide a consistent alternative to Obama's socialism. But McCain is failing to connect with the American people. His is a campaign of tactics, not strategy, for the good reason that he really has no grand strategy and no general stand on what government should or should not do.

It simply is not a fully worked out answer to this question, to oppose the raising of certain taxes. Nor does his tendency to pander, or to miss the many rhetorical opportunities Obama has given him, afford us insight into his wise thinking on this central moral issue of the campaign.

The question posed is whether people who earn their own living are better able to use and dispose of the fruits of their labor, intelligence, and talent than are a group of politicians pandering to favored constituencies, yet protesting their devotion to the general welfare?

There is a prudential argument implied in the question, and practicality bears upon the moral problem: Does man have an unconditional and exclusive right to the fruits of his own life? Does man's life belong to the state, to the deity, to some earthly leader, or does it belong to the man himself?

Here is the critical distinction between socialism and capitalism. Under capitalism, the people who make the money make the decisions on how to spend it; under socialism, that choice is, to a greater or lesser degree, taken from the people and given to politicians acting as agents for the government.

Mr. Obama should be applauded for making more clear than does the typical politician that he believes one of the primary functions of government is the pillaging of the few for the unearned benefit of the many. An effective opponent does not oppose such class warfare by arguing that the few should be able to pillage the many--what Mr. Obama and socialists generally believe happens when people's rights and property are respected.

An effective opponent of socialism argues instead that no citizen should be pillaged, and that if rich people, such as Warren Buffett or Bill Gates, wish to give their resources away to others, that is their right to do so, but it is not right for government to confiscate private wealth, for the simple moral reason that wealth, as opposed to plunder, must first be created. Who has a greater claim, those who create the wealth or a gang of politicians who have succeeded in getting themselves elected to office?

Clearly Mr. Obama believes that political gangs have greater moral claim to the creator's wealth than does the creator.

Whence comes this idea?

The idea that government has a greater moral claim to a people's wealth than the people do derives from the belief that people's lives belong to the government. If the government owns your life, morally and legally it has the right and even obligation to use and dispose of your life any way it sees fit. This is the central idea of socialism, fascism, communism, and every other form of government men have devised to steal the people's wealth, make war, and enrich themselves at the expense of others.

It is certainly legitimate to make the argument that organizing society on the basis of such altruism cannot work. It has been tried over and over again and failed as often as it has been tried.

But why aren't the great moral arguments against socialism brought out by the Republicans? Could it be that Republicans have come to accept the same flawed morality?

As religious conservatives and traditionalists have gained influence, the Party finds itself intellectually incapable of opposing a political philosophy--socialism--whose moral premises they share. Whether you believe man's life belongs to a deity or to a government, either choice denies the fundamental truth that man owns his own life and a proper, decent government does not presume to overrule a man's choices, unless he violates or threatens to violate another's rights.

Do you have an unconditional right to your own life?

That is the fundamental question in this election campaign that Mr. McCain fails to see clearly. Mr. Obama suffers from no such handicap and each day advances his answer.

Tom Anderson

October 2008