The rights of an American
Posted in Full Frontal Liberty by R Lee Wrights on April 10th, 2008 by Rachel Mills
The rights of an American are (or used to be) Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of property. That means the right not to be killed, the right not to be messed with, and the right to try to acquire stuff. To further specify what they believed our rights to be, the founding fathers added a few addenda, namely the bill of rights, which all kind of spring from the first basic three. You have a right to believe how you want, speak your mind, and so does the press. You have a right to pack heat. You don’t have to be a bed and breakfast for the military, et cetera. Oh, and just in case we left any rights out, doesn’t mean they don’t exist.
The Ninth Amendment. We’ve monkeyed with just about all the other amendments giving you rights. Declaring your rights, rather. From gun laws, to FCC limiting speech, gun control laws ranging all over the spectrum as if its from the bill of privileges, juries tampered with utterly until they actually believe they are an instrument of the government, instead of the people and therefore a CHECK on government laws. (How do you think the ante-bellum North was free? No jury would enforce slave laws up there. We could end the drug war the same way. But that’s for another day.)
Interestingly enough, we’ve had problems with that 9th amendment too because it gives us a loophole to imagine new rights. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t mind the right to privacy that Roe V. Wade established with it, but what I’m concerned about now are the entitlements we’ve fabricated for ourselves recently. Such as a right to an education and quality healthcare. Prescription drugs. Housing. Food. So what’s wrong with those? Let’s deal with healthcare, by way of example. A sense of entitlement to healthcare turns doctors into community slaves, doesn’t it? Oh, come on, you say. Slaves?
