You Cannot Give A Right To Someone Else That You Yourself Do Not Have

You and what army would stop someone like Blackwater from doing whatever the fuck they wanted?

What "individual citizens" would be able to stop marauding bands of people with guns? What people with what jobs would be able to "seek restitution," whatever the hell that means, and how do they expect to keep order if people don't "voluntarily" agree? And if these folks could do this, would you mind putting them to work in places like Somalia?

The word "justice" itself is meaningless without government since without law there is no fucking crime. There's only mob violence or unjustifiable force.

What do you not get about this? You cannot peacefully enforce "justice" and it does *not* take a government for people to act shitty and terrible to one another.

Blackwater IS Trillion dollar government contracts. If Blackwater lost its governmental industrial complex, and became a free market dispute resolution organization (lost its legal right to aggressive violence on peaceful people), that is what I strive for. Agencies that can only protect peaceful people, versus using threats of coercion on people who have never infringed on others.

One has to question the concept of "self evident truth" to really get to the bottom of this argument.

In what avenue would they be seeking justice, in a PRIVATE justice system ?!?!?

Blackwater IS private enterprise.

Nothing is truly private in statism. It is actually a government licensed and protected corporation. This is the furthest thing from a free market. The entire military industrial complex is funded with government tax dollars.

So they lose their "government" mandate and just become regular mercenaries instead.

Remind me again how that's better?

This Red Herring is just proof that you have no idea how to answer these questions, you've barely thought any of this garbage through.

Now That certainly is a fundamental ethical debate.

( I personally turn to Plato for that sort of thing - but my feeling is that existentialists and utilitarians seem to look at things differently,....go figure. )

I think we have spun completely OUT of the limited idea domain of "politics" or even "political philosophy" with that one !

p.s. - I DO take your point . . . .in THIS context, the "rights" discussed are simply a matter of social consensus,....or at least the collective pragmatic/convenient fiction of it,....

Anyone who understands that it's junk logic based on sophistry and bad philosophy.

Well said!

That's a sad opinion. Good luck finding a developed country that doesn't "steal" (a.k.a. tax you).

Because the rights you enjoy are bestowed upon you by the government, whose right it is, in turn, is to enforce those laws in order to guarantee that you retain those bestowed rights.

I pity you if you think your rights are bestowed by your government. This reveals a basic failure to even understand proper government OR individual rights. Your rights are a gift from God, they are innate to every human individual. NO government can rightfully impinge upon those rights...to do so is an act of tyranny.

When you accept that rights are granted by the government, then you must accept the fact that a government can rightfully remove those rights, and that is not tyranny.

The God-given rights, or inalienable rights, are basic: The right to life, liberty, and property. Therein lies the "pursuit of happiness." The basic question of what government can rightfully do is answered by asking what the individual can rightfully do. Do I, as an individual, have a right to tell my neighbor that they cannot smoke marijuana? No. God did not give me the right to dictate what others may eat, drink, or smoke. So therefore, I cannot assign that right to my servant, the government. Remember that in the United States, we have SELF government. We assign our government their power... and this is rightful power because it is limited to what power we as an individual have to give. If we don't have that power, we can't ask the government to do it either.

Take the case of the early frontier days. You had a rancher out in the sticks. Call him Rancher A. Rancher B lives next door, and Rancher C further down the road. Now each of these ranchers is using those inalienable rights... they have life, they have liberty and they have some property AND they have a right to defend those three things. So when a bad guy comes along and starts rustling cattle from his ranch, Rancher A stops work and chases the bad guy. Soon he discovers that he can hardly get any ranching work done, because he is spending all his time chasing bad guys. Rancher B and Rancher C are experiencing the same problem. So one day they are talking and comparing notes, and come up with a plan: Let's hire a Sheriff, and get him to protect our life, liberty, and our property. Thus government is established, and it is good, because it is limited by and gets it's ONLY powers from the individuals it governs. If the Sheriff were then to go to the Ranchers and say, Rancher D didn't have a good year, So I'm taxing each of you so we can give that money to him, that would be outside of the power he rightfully has. If he were to go to Rancher B and say, "You can't plant wheat in that field because Rancher A wants to see flowers next to his Ranch" that would be beyond his power. The rights of the INDIVIDUAL have been assigned to him by Rancher A, B, and C... and those are the ONLY rights he has. No other power can exist except in a tyranny. Correct government cannot tell you your children MUST go to public school, or MUST have an inoculation, or that you MUST save the habitat of the spotted owl, or that you MUST pay taxes to provide for those who are unwilling to work. All these things are rightfully choices that God allows men the freedom to make.

Protecting life, liberty and property is the only proper roll of government. ANYTHING more or less than this is tyranny and oppression. And anyone who doesn't understand this, or who thinks their rights come from the government, would most likely consent to be lead like a sheep to the slaughter, bleating mournfully as they go, and yet walking complacently along. A pitiful state indeed.

God doesn't exist.

I didn't base my argument on fantasy: I based it on fact. Our constitution, as a document, spells out the rights of the government and the rights of its people. This is fact. Our rights are encoded in law. You can look it up. We have the right to bear arms, the right to free speech, etc.

You, on the other hand, can't prove that God exists, much less make the case that he gave you rights.

We are talking about legal rights, not what you think should be rights, and not what you feel is morally acceptable.

And your hypothetical is silly and devoid of historical context.