First Principles: The Rights To Life and Property

Prologue:

First, let us get one thing straight: rights belong to people only, and are against other people, organizations, and governmental entities. The only natural and just limit on your rights are the rights of other people. If you begin to violate my rights, you have overstepped the just exercise of your rights. Governments and corporations have no rights of their own. They may be granted privileges, and they may receive special legal standing, but these are not rights.

Rights belong only to people, and they are both inherent and immutable. A man may give up the exercise of his rights, but he cannot give up his rights. The alternatives may be grim indeed, but no one can force a person not convicted of any crime to abandon his rights.

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Your life is not your own, but it belongs to God. Genesis teaches us that man only came to life when God put his breath into man. The state and a corporation did not give you life. Unless you waive it, you have to the right to be the sole caretaker of your own life. You may live under a tyrant whose regime takes your life but has no right to it. You may commit a crime so severe that the law states you must be killed for it, but that crime you committed was voluntary.

You are the only one with a right to say whether you live or die.

If you have not been born yet, that does not give your mother the right to kill you. If you are inconvenient to her, she should have kept her legs crossed. If your existence causes her mental anguish because of the conditions of your conception or the identity of your sperm donor, she does not have the right to kill you, any more than a neo-nazi has a right to kill a jew whose mere existence offends the neo-nazi. In extremely rare instances, a child being borne to term would pose a hazard to the continued life of the mother. In such a case, with prayer and much consideration, that woman and she alone has the right to choose whose life will persist.

If you are deathly ill and your life is only extended by the intervention of doctors with machines and medications without which you would surely die, and you demand the removal of the intervention, that is not suicide. That is allowing nature to take its course. The State, your family, and your doctor, have no right to prevent your allowing yourself to die. Cutting your own life short is another matter. If you would live even a day longer, you should not take your own life. Your doctor says you have 2 months to live, and those months will be painful? Get a prescription from a pain management doctor and live out the life that was given to you (and is, remember, not your own).

If you have made it through that, you may find the rest of my arguments easier to agree with, so keep reading.

The right to life is fundamental to your other rights. Because you have a right to life, you also have a derivative right to sustain your life by whatever means you can find, so long as your means do not infringe on the rights of others. That means you have a right to work at a job for which you are qualified as long as your employer is willing to give you the job. When you go to work, you have the right to enforce your employment agreement against your employer and demand the wages which are your due. Another way to say it is, you have a right to wages you have legitimately earned for yourself.

Compensation at a job these days mostly means some form of currency (dollars) are given to you in consideration of your having given an employer your time and/or services. To rephrase the foregoing, you have a right to trade hours out of your lifespan for money. Those hours were yours to trade because your life is yours to care for. It is not illogical or improper to say then that your money is a converted form of time you took away from doing something else in your life while you worked for your employer.

Your money is your life, converted into a medium of exchange so that you may more easily acquire things necessary to the maintenance of your life.

It is entirely beside the point to ask how much money you make. You and your employer both consider that your wages and your time are traded at a fair rate. Everyone else in the world can feel free to take a long walk off a short pier if they think you are being given too much - or too little - media of exchange (money) for your life.

I will take you one step further and then we will be through for now.

You have a right to your money. Unless you consent to it, nobody else has a right to your money, any more than they have a right to your life. Because you have an absolute right to your money, you have the right to buy with it what you wish. We have seen that your money is a different form of your life, and here we go one step further. What you buy with your money is a converted form of your money. Therefore:

The things you purchase are a converted form of your life, and all the ways you may defend your own life may be legitimately used to defend your

Property.

Hold on there.

Did I just say I am in favor of killing people for petty theft? No.

If someone offers you a minor threat to your life, such as a simple assault, it may be that you decide the threat to your life is not worth answering with lethal force. Perhaps all that is required to preserve yourself is a gentle word to sooth someone's anger. It should be obvious that you should not reach for the shotgun in every circumstance where some other person's desire bumps into your rights! It should also be apparent that in almost every case, the only person with a right to decide what level of force is an appropriate response is the individual who has been threatened.

Let us suppose that you knew that you would die exactly one year from today. If someone tried to kill you today, would you quietly allow them to cut your life short by one year? Let us suppose that you are driving a car that cost you a full year's wages to purchase. That car, in a very real sense, IS one year of your productive life. Would you allow some car thief to take it? The answers to both of those questions, if you are honest with yourself and following my logic, should be the same. Perhaps you would allow someone to steal a year of your life. I think I would not, if I could prevent them, and that goes all the way to the extreme of being willing to end their life for their attempt to take mine.

Is it "worth it" to kill someone over a car? A computer? A pair of shoes? You are the only person with the right to decide for yourself how much of your life is worth the rest of a theif's life. I submit for your consideration that the life of someone who makes his living by stealing little pieces of others' lives, is worth as close to nothing as can be, if you insist that they must have some value. It could also be said that such a one is a net drain on society, and the value of his life is negative. I won't go so fare as to say we should kill all career criminals outright for the general good of society - though some people might - but if we would keep them safely locked away from the good people of the world, we would all be much better off.