Just because you believe something doesn't mean they were liars -- which is your case here. The Framers said they didn't give any rights, they just protected them. So either that's what they did, or you're calling them liars.
So we're going to have to draw a line here now between the two documents you are mixing together. The Declaration of Independence is the document that established the idea of unalienable rights (only those specifically mentioned were life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, though they held there may be others.) The rights that are being argued here are from the Constitution, which makes no mention of unalienable rights (and coincidentally was written by a different set of people). So now that's out of the way -
No one is calling the Framers liars. As mentioned above, the Framers put nothing about Creator granted unalienable rights. The Framers couldn't even all agree on what rights should go to the people. They decided that a slave should count as 3/5 of a person, despite the fact that the writers of the Declaration of Independence declared "all men created equal." But the argument over whether the Framers (but not really since the Framers didn't write the Declaration of Independence), is not really of material to this debate about where rights come from.
The Constitution itself operates from that view, in that it notes that any rights not listed still belong to the people (or the states, when they are matters of states v federal). That indicates that rights exists, and can neither be taken away nor granted -- and that's the law of the land.
Again, I'm thinking you're just not understanding the concept here. You're arguing the universality of unalienable rights by (incorrectly) referring to the
US Constitution. Rights are not unalienable (adj. Not to be separated, given away, or taken away; inalienable) in countries that don't recognize the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution. I'm going to try this again. If you walk into North Korea and bad mouth lil' Kim over there, you will be arrested and thrown in jail (depriving you of your "unalienable right" of liberty). You can be tortured indefinitely (depriving you of your "unalienable right" to pursuit of happiness). You could be killed (depriving you of your "unalienable right" to life). As you can see, when a right is taken away from you, it is not unalienable. There are countries that do not give you the right to free speech. Sure you have the physical ability to say what you want, and you could talk all day to yourself where no one else can hear (enter in your idea of self-ownership), but if you exercise what you view to be your right, then there will be consequences. Try to exercise your "unalienable right" of the right to bear arms in the UK. Try to exercise your "unalienable right" to vote in Somalia. Why don't you go investigate your "unalienable right" to equal protection under the law in Saudi Arabia (although this applies more to females, but you'd have it not too much better being what I assume to be a non-Muslim.)
So while all of your quotes sound amazingly great (which is why Libertarians cream themselves every time they hear them), the reality of the matter is that your rights are not unalienable and you only have them because the government specifically gave them to you, despite it being dressed up in fluffy language.
Thank you for contradicting yourself and showing that you're wrong.
I think the real problem here is you have a hard time understanding what words mean. That was clearly not a contradiction. You can have self-ownership and have freedoms with yourself all day, every day. You can live your life without a single person owning your body, forcing you to do things you don't want to do, etc. However, what you do with yourself is independent of how you interact with others. The idea of self-ownership is a contradiction in itself because it is impossible to achieve in a society of more than one. For instance, I can walk around all day controlling my thoughts and actions and feelings. I walk up to you and talk to you. The control you have over your life doesn't allow others to talk to you. So I've just now violated your idea of self-ownership in that you weren't in complete control of that interaction. Was it that I took away your self-ownership and you became my property? Or was it simply because my idea of how my life should be run clashes with your idea of how your life should be run? Either way, by your argument, I just took ownership of you and trampled all over your unalienable rights. Or maybe I actually didn't and you're just full of BS. I know which one has the most statistical weight currently.
Take a man who owns a car. Someone takes the car and buries it in concrete. By your reasoning, he no longer owns a car. But in fact, he still owns the car, he's just being prohibited from using it, by application of coercion.
Wow. You aren't good with analogies are you? Let's try one that reflects what I am actually trying to say. Take a man who owns a car. He owns this car in Jackfuckistan where the law states you only own a car if its condition is not buried in concrete. So I bury this guy's car in concrete. He now no longer owns that car. Since I am in Jackfuckistan and not the United States, I have to apply Jackfuckistan's law (since that is what is enforced by the mighty) instead of the United States's law. Now i may have damaged his idea of self-ownership (which I have shown above happens all of the time since you can't have a society where perfect self-ownership exists), but I do not own him. I don't control the way he thinks or feels. Barring other strange Jackfuckistanian laws on the books, I can't dictate to him how to feel or act. We'll even pretend Jackfuckistan decided they liked the US Bill of Rights and I can't take away his freedom to tell me to go fuck myself for burying his car and taking away ownership. But none of that changes the fact that he no longer owns a car in Jackfuckistan.
So again, you show that you believe that coercion is the only moral principle, that whatever anyone might manage to accomplish by the use or threat o force is what is legitimate. At root, that makes people property.
I would restate that. I don't believe coercion is the only moral principle. People can completely choose to not coerce. Take the US Constitution for instance. This was generally a peaceful, non-coercive list of rights. Of course, I'm sure there was all sorts of coercion to actually to get everyone to agree to put them in there (the 3/5 person clause for instance is a great example of how coercion was used), but it wasn't a country-wide experience.
I will agree that threat or force is what ultimately gets people to do anything. Whether it's me holding a gun to someone's head to make them give me all of their money or the threat of possibly losing your liberties that's gets you posting up on JUB, the idea of losing something you want is what gets people motivated. I don't think that makes people property. What it means is that they value their unalienable right to life more than they value their other rights.
Rights are merely aspects of what self-ownership means. Your position is that people don't own their own mouths, their own hands, their own lives even -- but that's patently false. If they didn't own their own mouths and hands, there would never have been a Magna Carta, a Bannockburn Declaration, a French Revolution, or more recently, a civil rights movement or an Arab Spring. THose all happened when people decided to exercise their rights -- their self-ownership -- despite what the forces of coercion that you champion might do in response.
My position is not that at all. If you would just take the extra time to read what I say, I clearly said earlier you have the physical ability to say what you want, touch what you want, live however you want - but that doesn't mean that you're not going to be jailed for it in places that don't grant you those unalienable rights. Having an ability to do something and the freedom to do it are two completely different things. You mention the Arab Spring as an example. Sure, it worked in some places. But look at Syria. These people aren't given the rights by the government to freedom of speech and freedom of assembly, and they're getting killed for it. Maybe it's how you view rights. It seems your view is if I say a word a government says I'm not allowed to say and get shot dead for it, then that's ok because I exercised my unalienable right. I view a right as being something I can do without the worry of reprisal, punishment, death, loss of happiness, imprisonment, etc.
Thus, especially, in a democratic republic there must needs be an awareness that elected representatives are insufficient to represent the needs of each individual citizen, as we understand an nation through its component membership...thus, leading me to understand that each citizen must represent the spirit of the republic that presumes to inspire liberty for all. Here we speak to the actions of Edward Snowden who through his selfless sacrifices stands for those very liberties that the state apparatus has compromised in the name of state security.....a trap calculated to delude and deceive those who believe that their welfare and security resides within the organs of the state.
You're forgetting that the US is a
Representative Democratic Republic. That means that the government is specifically designed to be composed of representatives who speak for their constituents, not citizens voting directly on all matters. There is no type of government that can support the needs of each individual citizen. It sounds to me like you're championing anarchy maybe? Even then, not everyone's interests are addressed since resources MUST be shared. Anarchy is like 100% alcohol - you can only achieve it for a moment before it starts absorbing compounds from the environment around it to dilute it down.
And what we talk about here is Edward Snowden - a traitor that exposed secrets of the government he was sworn to keep without providing any evidence of wrongdoing. And I would trust the government more to protect me from an aggressive Russia, a sneaky China, or a band of roving terrorists more than I would trust you or Kulindhar to do so (unless I wanted to drown them in internet bullshit.) Hell, I wouldn't trust myself to be able to do it.
No -- rights have always been inalienable and inherent. And when authorities have recognized those rights, it has been because they have been forced to do so by people who realized that the rights are theirs -- they just have to remind government who is in charge. In that sense, you have it totally backwards: rights -- their free exercise -- have never been given, they have always been taken. The barons took the exercise of their rights back from King John, the colonists took back the exercise of their rights from the foreign king.
"Free exercise" of rights in it's very use indicates that they are indeed granted by governments. Free exercise of rights indicates that there is some force that is opposed to those rights and that there is some mitigating factor there protecting the exercising of said rights. You're conflating the ideas of "ability to do something" with the idea of "unalienable right to do it." By your definition, anything I can think of that I can physically do is an inherent right that is unalienable. Thus, if I could physically do so, I could kill a person just because. If I could physically do so, I could rape someone just because I can. Which leads into the idea that rights are never ever to be truly freely exercised because there are other people on this Earth besides you who have a different idea of what their rights are and those might directly conflict with what your ideas of what your rights are.
Government is nothing but an artificial construct put together by people who decide there has to be some sort of authority. Nothing belongs to it by nature, neither power nor authority. It cannot give, because it only has what it has been given.
I could almost agree with you here. Although I won't because you have it partially wrong. Government is set up by SOME of the people because they realize that the population needs to be governed. The smart ones understand that everyone doing their own thing is not a realistically achievable situation because of the nature of humans and the environment we are forced to share. Yes, they all do rise and fall, but that is because they are all involving humans, which are fallible creatures.
So self-ownership is the most practical thing in the political realm: it tells people that all the power and authority rests with them, and if their government abuses that, they have the right to abolish that government and institute a new one. The government is their property, not that of those who fill the seats, elected or bureaucratic. Self-ownership is the reality; it's the notion that government is anything of itself that is the fantasy -- and that makes all the difference in everyday reality.*
Without self-ownership and people becoming aware of it, we'd all still be living under absolute monarchs, most likely in poverty.
* As an example, if everyone in the US followed the advice of multiple Supreme Court justices and never, ever answered questions from the police, it wouldn't take long before we had reminded those arms of coercion that they are our servants, and nothing more.
Self-ownership is actually the most impractical (and the most laughable) thing in the political realm. The idea that everyone has equal power and just voluntarily yields it to the government to govern is absurd. Everyone doesn't have the power. There are those that go out and do and those that sit back and watch those that do. And even if your idea of some self-owning Utopia existed, it would still be as corrupt and terrible as the current system and would actually eventually just turn right back into a government. I go back to my argument of "might makes rights." If you and I are living next to each other in our self-owned environment and I owned a gun and you didn't, you would have what I said you could have. Why? Because there is nothing you could do about it, unless you went to others who had guns to get together with you to get rid of me. Uh oh. Guess what? You have your beginnings of a government there again, where the ones with the guns will set the rules and you without will follow them until you get your own gun, at which point you'll be the one with the might and things will go the way you say, even if it is you ordering people to be self-owned.
That is a superb observation from Paine.
Your final paragraph points to the reason that checks and balances were imposed on the government from without, not merely within. Government schools teach the checks and balances between the branches of government, but remain mum when it comes to the power of the citizenry to balance that of the government, such as the ancient power of the jury to negate the law, or the ultimate right to insurrection.
There is no right to insurrection according to the Constitution. In fact, it charges Congress with putting down insurrections. And your characterization of a jury being able to negate the law is shaky. Yes, they could decide the case they were hearing despite the evidence in the face of a law, but they can't actually change a law.
