"You always have rights"
Political, Work ·Saturday July 4, 2009 @ 17:30 EDT (link)
Rights are not tokens handed out by countries. You always have rights. They are inalienable. The state has no more authority to hand out rights than a clown at the circus.
—Hugh Diedrichs, September 2008
What a great quote for this day. Hugh worked at Microsoft, but unfortunately was let go in the layoffs earlier this year. He was a frequent and now much missed participant in Conservatives and Libertarians at Microsoft (CLAMS) discussion list. I also have this quote on my door in building 36.
On this day, consider your natural rights: while governments may enumerate them, for example in our Bill of Rights, and sometimes evil governments may stifle, subvert, or suppress them, they are always there and always yours, and you need not ask anyone's permission to exercise them. Among these rights are speech, self defense, and property: but there are many others, which we must be vigilant to protect from government encroachment.
Another quote I considered was one from the Declaration of Independence:
But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.
Twice in the history of America has independence been declared: once liberty won (the American Revolution), and once tyranny (Lincoln over the Confederate States of America). To whom then will go the next attempt? Secession is not a right governments may give out either: what government would willingly lose taxes and land (Lincoln: "If I do that [recognize the Confederate States of America], what would become of my revenue?")? Certainly the British government did not willingly cede autonomy to the 13 colonies. One would think that based on this experience, the Federal government would have acknowledged the new nation and begun trade negotiations: but instead they provoked a bloody war of conquest. And so again, I must ask: to whom the next war of independence? To the people, and to liberty: or to the oligarchs of government, and to tyranny?
