Sunday, April 29, 2007

I guess this makes me an evil Hobbesian

I don't know if it's just my frustration with goddamn Constitutional Law talking here, or my French ancestry piping up with a willingness to roll over in the face of oppression, but I'm beginning to wonder if this whole idea of inalienable rights is just B.S.

Take, for instance, freedom to criticize your government. A thousand well-intentioned documents can proclaim that all people have the right to criticize their governments, but in reality, 99.9999999% of the people ever to walk this earth didn't have that right at all, and many of the rest of them had that right limited in some way or another. Either all those governments were unnatural abominations, or that so-called right doesn't really exist.

The government decides what rights you have got and what rights you have not got. The U.S. government has decided to give you some and not give you others. Don't like it? Go fight City Hall.

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