Understanding Your Most Fundamental Rights, Part I

The Coach's Team ^ | 12/26/16 | Bill Norton

[Oldpuppymax]

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers by the consent of the governed,…”

That quote, from the Declaration of Independence sums it all up—we all have equal rights from nature and nature’s God and laws are established with our consent to protect those rights. Once understood, these simple truths make it easier to understand the proper role of government and all other principles of liberty fall into place.

Many Americans behave as if government somehow gives us our rights and has the authority to distribute and redistribute those rights. This assumes government existed before our rights. The French statesman Frederic Bastiat clarified the truth of the matter when he said: “Life, liberty, and property do not exist because men have made laws. On the contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty, and property existed beforehand that caused men to make laws in the first place.”

It is important to understand where our rights came from in order to distinguish which government policies protect those rights and which policies violate them.

“Self-evident truths” are truths that are so obvious, so rational and so morally sound that their authenticity is beyond reasonable dispute. Simply put, it is just the way things are. Self-evident truths are natural laws and natural laws, once discovered, learned and understood, require no additional proof. Natural law is the natural reaction to an action—“what goes up must come down,” “equal and opposite reaction,” etc. There are natural law principles in everything around us from the natural laws of science to natural laws of human...