The USA is the most prosperous and powerful country in the world. Unlike virtually every other country the USA was instituted by the people with very different and unique ideas. Our country and the documents we hold almost Sacred, the Declaration of Independence, the US Constitution, and the Bill of Rights were created towards the end of a period of time called The Age of Enlightenment.
Historian Peter Gay in his book The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, asserts the Enlightenment broke through "the sacred circle," whose dogma had circumscribed thinking. The Enlightenment is held to be the source of critical ideas, such as the centrality of freedom, democracy, and reason as primary values of society. This view argues that the establishment of a contractual basis of rights would lead to the market mechanism and capitalism, the scientific method, religious tolerance, and the organization of states into self-governing republics through democratic means. In this view, the tendency of the philosophies in particular to apply rationality to every problem is considered the essential change.
Read these famous words from the Declaration of Independence, they hold the essence of "rights" and what makes the USA different from every other country in the world.
| “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 from the consent of the governed.” |
Because of forefathers where learned “Enlightened” men, they realized that history had proven the principle that power corrupts, thus they instituted a government designed to limit corruption. A government instituted not to rule, but to protect the people. Maybe this is why it is the most prosperous and powerful nation in the world.
Rather than put power in the hands of a man, or group of men, our forefathers put the authority in the Law, and the constitution which limited what laws could be instituted. Because men can and are corrupted by power, our forefathers instituted a government in which no man, even the president, is above the law. They specifically delegated only certain powers to the government, added to the constitution specific rights the government was forbidden from abridging, and reserving all powers not specifically granted to the government to the people or to the states. They divided the powers and gave us a system of checks and balances that further limited the government not the people. They assumed that if one branch of government tried to take more power than granted to it by the constitution one of the other branches would stop it. President B. Obama noted in a recent townhall meeting about healthcare, that our constitution was the problem, it makes large wholesale changes to society very difficult.
Unlike every other government in the world, our government was created to protect the rights of individual citizens not to make it easy for the government to rule. It was created as a Republic not a Democracy so that mob rule couldn’t take away the rights of individuals. Note what our fore fathers considered to be rights; “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness”. You don’t have a right to be happy only the liberty to pursue happiness. The rights protected in the Bill of Rights, are not granted by the government are considered to pre-date the government and to be “unalienable”, sometimes called “Natural Rights”. It is the government infringement upon the natural rights of individuals that our constitution forbids.
If you consider the rights protected by the bill of rights they all fall into the more general rights of “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness”:
You don't have to pay for your rights. You only need to be left alone. Rights are not dependent upon the actions of some other person. We limit the government from infringing on unalienable rights, offering liberty and equal protection for every person, to pursue happiness, and live without interference by the government. No place do we guarantee or insure that people are happy only that they have the liberty to gain happiness for themselves.
Nobody has a right to the life of another. You own yourself; hence nobody has the right to your labor and the property you have acquired through your labor. You don’t pay for your rights. You have liberty to purchase whatever health services you choose to pay for, and should not be denied those services based on your age, sex, color, religion, etc. What you don’t have a right to is to use the labor and property of others to pay for you to receive those services.
Because of fascists and socialist ideas creeping into our government, many in government are trying to make or consider healthcare to be a right. All versions of healthcare bills currently in congress require everybody to purchase health insurance. Those who choose not to exercise their right to healthcare (actually those who choose to self insure and pay as they go) will be forced to purchase health insurance. Does this mean that everybody who chooses not to keep and bear arms is to be forced to purchase a firearm, and if they refuse, the government will issue them a firearm and the cost of that firearm added to their taxes?
"Does this mean that everybody who chooses not to keep and bear arms is to be forced to purchase a firearm, and if they refuse, the government will issue them a firearm and the cost of that firearm added to their taxes?"
ReplyDeleteOh, I'd dearly love to hear that one asked in the press, or at a townhall meeting!