Nathaniel

Shockey

Read Nathaniel's bio and previous columns here

February 25, 2009

Sorry: Your ‘Rights’ are Mostly a Delusion

Rights are a delusion. They’re things someone made up and an unfortunately large portion of us decided were a really convenient way to get free stuff.

What if an AK-47-toting child soldier from Sierra Leone discovers his rights and decides he doesn’t want to kill anymore? The best-case scenario is that his superiors kindly inform him that he has as many rights as beach houses.

What about the Mexican immigrant caught sneaking into the U.S. who explains that, as a human being, he has the right to freedom, to keep the money he earns, the right to work hard and support his family? The border patrol agent tells him he has the right to fill out a lot of paperwork and hope for the best.

What happens when the Icelandic government claims it has the right to import products? They are informed that they have the right to import anything they can pay for, and that, having gone bankrupt, they automatically forfeited quite a few of their rights.

People born in America are lucky because we’ve been born into a country whose forefathers had the wisdom to limit what they deemed our “rights.” They didn’t say we have the right to be provided for as long as we work reasonably hard. They said we have the right to keep what we earn, to provide for each other as we see fit without being burdened by theft from within or war from without. They said we have the right to seek out a plumber when our pipes stop working. They said we have the right to exchange value for value, and that we can place value on whatever we want.

But even these rights – among which are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness – are imagined. In reality, they are simply goals of our nation, not truly endowed to us by God. But they are wise and reachable goals that provide a framework for much more than a country that is merely sustainable. By stating in our Declaration of Independence that the United States of America believes men can govern themselves based on the idea of freedom, the forefathers of this nation enabled us to truly prosper.

But our government has been silently amending the very pillars of wisdom that made us great, adding to our short list of rights things like housing, health care, employment, and apparently an $8 billion express train from Los Angeles to Las Vegas. Our alleged representative government has begun to feed us lies that, as human beings, we are, by definition, entitled to much more than we ever realized.

The problem is that these ideas are completely made up, untrue and impractical.

One cannot work whatever he deems a reasonable amount and expect that both he and his family will be completely provided for – unless he is in the mafia, of course.

Just think about it for a second. When people form a government and say, “we believe the following to be our rights (goals),” it means those elected promise to take a certain amount of money earned by every citizen and put it towards trying to accomplish the protection of these rights. By expanding the rights, it expands the job the government pledges to do, which expands the amount of money each citizen needs to give. The more value we give away, the less we have with which to trade, which literally limits our freedom.

Consider the IRS, our health care system or any form of insurance. The larger these institutions become in order to accommodate the needs of the people, the more money we’re pumping into a system that doesn’t do anything but delegate. As they grow, efficiency shrinks.

This is what is occurring with our government. Almost without asking, it is racking up huge amounts of debt by recklessly borrowing. This money, although some of us may not already see it, will come out of our pockets. Our government’s role is expanding under the veil of “regulation,” and the result is more of our money going toward regulators. It can’t possibly work well. Do you feel less free? You should.

In a mad dash for cash, our elected officials are trying to increase their role and have subtly convinced us that we have more rights that we ever realized. At the same time, we, and especially those who follow in our footsteps, will be burdened with a weight that is nearly unbearable, with a debt that will be almost impossible to repay.

We have each other to thank for allowing a group of people to place power mongering under the seductive veil called “rights.”

© 2009 North Star Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.

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