Murphy’s Bye-Laws

“Rights can neither be created nor be destroyed”

The above law was prompted by the headline I saw on my Yahoo page this morning stating (paraphrased; I can’t find the headline now), “House bill to make health care a right” or maybe “…a right of all Americans.”  As any cognitive person who isn’t out to exercise control of others could tell you, the Bill of Rights – or any other declaration of rights – doesn’t establish rights at all, but only enumerated some of them. Rights cannot be legislated into existence because they existed before the legislation (Skipping for now the always contentious discussion of the existence of rights, natural law, etc in the first place. Try the discussion here for that.).

“Rights can neither be created nor be destroyed”

Looking at the LCR again, I’m reminded of something I read in Mises’ Human Action a few days ago about theorems and a priori knowledge.  “Aprioristic reasoning is purely conceptual and deductive. It cannot produce anything else but tautologies and analytic judgments. All its implications are logically derived from the premises and were already contained in them.” (Ch.2 Sec 3) In the case of rights, all rights are derived from the premise that we own ourselves. This ownership gives the owner exclusive control over the thoughts and actions in that domain, which happens to extend only as far as the next person’s domain. Trying to fabricate a right to health care isn’t correcting some trespass upon those not receiving such care, but initiating a trespass upon those who must provide it, i.e. pay for it via time or taxes. In other words, not a right at all because it cannot possibly be derived logically from the premise of self-ownership.

“Rights can neither be created nor be destroyed”

According to the LCR, rights cannot be legislated away, either. Free speech zones, gun bans, and prohibition don’t eliminate the rights to free speech, self-defense, or the pursuit of happiness but simply trespass against them. Suppression of the exercise of rights, such as those things listed previously, still doesn’t destroy the right.

Exploring further into this will surely lead to the dabate about rights’ existence and premises, but I’ll leave that for another time.  For now, let’s just leave it at the Law of Conservation of Rights, shall we?

The Supreme Court has issued the decision for the Heller case against the Washington D.C. gun ban this morning.  The assenting opinion, which came out in favor of Heller, can be found here.  But just like the nefarious “free speech zones,” we may now end up with “2nd Amendment zones” that will confine our rights to our home.  Pretty soon, it really won’t be safe to leave the house!

The sheep’s clothing in this case is rejecting the outright banning of possesion of handguns, such as the D.C. law.  On the surface it appears as if a blow was struck against gun control; certainly the militia-only argument, which is based on a collective right idea, was rejected by the majority.  But as soon as the complete ban on handguns – especially in the home – is decided to be unconstitutional, the Justices promptly put up fences all around the 2nd Amendment Right to confine it and limit it.  So while an outright ban is no good, the decision may actually set back the 2nd Amendment against gun regulation worse than before.

So while the opposite decision would have been immediately disastrous, the actual decision was still damaging.  One cannot rely on police or a court or any unit of the government to define, protect, or enforce an individual’s rights.  The institution of government is dialectically opposed to such concepts and can only work to erode them in favor of its own power.  The dictates spewing forth from the halls of power can only command the zombies who listen.  Sometimes the zombies move with the flow of free people, but there may well be a time when a free person is required to move in a crowd of zombies hostile to their freedom.  After this decision, the streets are looking to be less safe for the non-zombified.

The long-running campaign to disarm the peons populous may come to a head tomorrow when the Obscene Supreme Court issues its ruling in the case of DC v. Heller.  Disarmament is a hot issue that was enlivened by reports of gun confiscation in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, and if it is decided, against any historical evidence and in complete incongruity with the rest of the Bill of Rights – that this is the one collective right in the BoR – then disarmament will be a hot issue once again.  No matter how illogical the gun control crowd’s arguments, they may have the illogical weight of the nation’s highest court to justify any actions following a collective rights ruling in this case.

For some reason and against observational evidence of the mainstream to the contrary, rugged individualism is still seen as a defining characteristic of “Americans.”  Perhaps this was true of the people who threw off colonization and picked a fight with a proverbial giant, but is it still true of people who whimper for a bailout at the first negative consequence of their own actions?  Our society has been moving away from individualism for many, many decades now – to its own detriment, in my opinion.  The very term “American” and a million other vast generalizations of the people living under the thumb of this government are necessary for such wide-reaching rule because the bureaucracy of bureaucracies that are the different levels of government cannot rule the millions of individuals; they can only rule generalizations.  The institutions of government have always known and believed this to be true.  When the individuals started buying into the idea of collectivization, that’s when the trouble started.

The creation of the concept of collective rights – indeed the creation of involuntary collectives themselves – may well be sanctioned by the Court’s decision tomorrow.  Of course, rugged individualist don’t put much merit into the decisions of high courts and other dictates of “authority.”  An unfavorable decision may just make the rugged have to get more rugged as the terrain dictates.