Libertarianism

[Warren Dew]

I just searched the Federalist papers for inalienable, unalienable and creator and got zero hits.

Try searching for "rights".

[MrJonno]

It's cool isn't it, if its not in the US constitution you can do it. Drive a car without a license, in fact choose which side of the road you want to drive on, personal ICBM in your back- garden no problems, drink beer at any age, in fact get your 5 year old completely wasted. Take as many as drugs as you want stick your pet kitten in a microwave.

No evil tyrannical government would ever choose to limit such things.

[Drewish]

Hey I wonder how this thread has developed?

... reads a few posts...

You people are fucking hopeless. I'm out.

[Seth]

It's cool isn't it, if its not in the US constitution you can do it. Drive a car without a license, in fact choose which side of the road you want to drive on, personal ICBM in your back- garden no problems, drink beer at any age, in fact get your 5 year old completely wasted. Take as many as drugs as you want stick your pet kitten in a microwave.

No evil tyrannical government would ever choose to limit such things.

A rational adult might someday come to understand the difference between "rights" and "reasonable regulation of the exercise of rights in the public interest." That lets you out evidently.

[MrJonno]

It's cool isn't it, if its not in the US constitution you can do it. Drive a car without a license, in fact choose which side of the road you want to drive on, personal ICBM in your back- garden no problems, drink beer at any age, in fact get your 5 year old completely wasted. Take as many as drugs as you want stick your pet kitten in a microwave.

No evil tyrannical government would ever choose to limit such things.

A rational adult might someday come to understand the difference between "rights" and "reasonable regulation of the exercise of rights in the public interest." That lets you out evidently.[/quote

No real difference if you are going to rely on moral and legal absolutes

[rasetsu]

No, you're not buying any because you're selling it, selling right-wing revisionist crap. I just searched the Federalist papers for inalienable, unalienable and creator and got zero hits. God is mentioned three times, but not in relation to rights. If you've got documents that support your vision, from publications of the founders, speeches, or deliberations of ratifying bodies, or any text in the Constitution itself, then produce it. If you can't provide textual, historical evidence that at the time of the writing and ratification of the Constitution that was the common legal understanding of the meaning of that document, then you're the one making stuff up out of thin air.

Show me the relevant documents or shove it.

Meh. Do your own homework. There's thousands of books out there that go through the history of the Constitution and the concepts upon which it was founded. I'm not going to bother to educate someone who has such a deficient education and understanding of concepts that have been perfectly clear for more than 200 years.

So in other words, you have no evidence, so you're going to reverse the burden of proof and ask me to prove you wrong. Doesn't work that way. Prove your point about the Constitution protecting unalienable rights or you lose.

And you want to know how I really know that you're pulling things out of thin air? I just went through the entire Constitution section by section, and there is basically nothing about individual rights in the entire document. My summary is between the hide tags below, if you want to check my work, though the Wikipedia entry on the Constitution does a better job of summarizing the document. So the people who ratified the United States Constitution couldn't have agreed on the "unalienable character of [individual] rights" because there's no such rights in the Constitution. Produce one of these unalienable rights from the U.S. Constitution or go away.

Er, no, and, exactly. If you look carefully at the construction of the document, [I looked carefully at the document and found no support for your claim; the person guilty of not actually looking at the document is you.]...

and of the Bill of Rights, [the Bill of Rights is irrelevant; you referred to ratification of the constitution]...

neither one "grants" any rights to any citizen. [I never claimed it did; if this is your primary claim, then you are guilty of ignoratio elenchi and wrong.]...

In every case it either protects preexisting rights [where in the Constitution is it protecting unalienable individual rights?]...

(as in the Bill of Rights) or it authorizes the government to do very specific and limited things. [ignoratio elenchi]...

Unlike the UN Charter of Human Rights, which states a laundry list of "rights" that people have, and thereby denies every right NOT included in that list, [irrelevant]...

the US Constitution operates on the presumption that the People have all rights, [ignoratio elenchi; the claim was that the ratification of the Constitution demonstrated an agreement about the "unalienable character of rights" (see the word, "acknowledges" in your original claim; acknowledgement is a positive, illocutionary act, not mere presumption)]...

as stated in the Declaration of Independence, [more ignoratio elenchi]...

and that they have all power, and that they grant certain, carefully limited authority to government [ignoratio elenchi, yet again]...

in the interests of securing their individual, preexisting, natural and fundamental rights. [Again, you've yet to produce one sentence from the constitution talking about individual rights; if they don't talk about individual rights, they can't be saying anything about their character. If you have no such evidence, your earlier claim is false.]

The Constitution and the Bill of Rights were [was] very carefully and explicitly designed that way precisely to prevent exactly what you are trying to do, which is to give government the power to issue, and therefore revoke individual rights. [and this is yet another claim you can't prove; now you have to quote where I, myself, did this in addition to showing where in the constitution it talks about unalienable rights.]....

But that's not what the Founders did, and they were quite careful not to do so. [What the founders didn't do is irrelevant, you've yet to show that what they did do is what you claimed; which you haven't come close to doing yet.]...

That's why the Bill of Rights expressly says, in the Tenth Amendment, "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." Powers flow from rights, of necessity, and all power flows from the consent of the governed. [This is not about the Bill Of Rights, as your claim was about what the ratifiers of the Constitution agreed to; quit trying to move the goal posts.]...

That's why the Second Amendment says "...the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." It doesn't say "the right to keep and bear arms is granted to the people." [Again, more ignoratio elenchi]

Every other case where rights of the people are mentioned is the same. [There is no "other case" as there is no first case in the Constitution where unalienable individual rights are mentioned; go ahead, prove me wrong, quote an "unalienable right" from the Constitution]...

The construction of the language assumes that the rights exist independent of the government [show me the money; which language in the constitution refers to "unalienable character of rights" or any unalienable rights, period.]...

and that the government is restricted in how it may regulate or infringe upon those preexisting individual rights. [more ignoratio elenchi]

You seem to be running every which which but loose away from your original claim. I say and have said nothing about whether the Constitution implies that the government is limited or restricted to only those powers explicitly granted to it. I've never asserted otherwise. That you've expended so much energy disproving something I never said is, while remarkable, totally irrelevant to the truth of the claim I challenged you on, which I repeat below for your reference, since you seem to be forgetting it and wandering off topic into irrelevant and unvoiced claims. Do you have anything, anything at all, to show that the Constitution expressly acknowledged the "unalienable rights" of the citizenry. You've already made clear you have nothing to back up the rest of your argument. The Constitution is a very short document. Read it and show me where it says anything about the unalienable character of rights. You can't do that, can you? And the reason you can't is because you were wrong.

"they (and the mass of people who ratified the Constitution) ultimately agreed on a form of government that acknowledges the fundamental, natural, inherent and unalienable character of rights"

Where in the Constitution does it address this?

(If you'd like, I can pull out all the red herrings from your recent retort, which is about 3/4 of the text, if you like. The simple challenge to you is to provide one statement about any unalienable right in the constitution. You can't, because the only rights described in the constitution are those of governments, which aren't unalienable. Show me the money or stfu.)

[Warren Dew]

Do you have anything, anything at all, to show that the Constitution expressly acknowledged the "unalienable rights" of the citizenry.

Indeed, it seems that if there were such rights, and the government was not allowed to infringe on them, that the founders would have written some acknowledgement of those other rights into the constitution. Maybe they should have said something like

The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

If they forgot to put that in the constitution, you'd think they'd at least put in an amendment to say that, somewhere in the first nine amendments or so!

[rasetsu]

Do you have anything, anything at all, to show that the Constitution expressly acknowledged the "unalienable rights" of the citizenry.

Indeed, it seems that if there were such rights, and the government was not allowed to infringe on them, that the founders would have written some acknowledgement of those other rights into the constitution. Maybe they should have said something like

The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

If they forgot to put that in the constitution, you'd think they'd at least put in an amendment to say that, somewhere in the first nine amendments or so!

Asked and answered. Do you have anything relevant to say?

[Coito ergo sum]

If you're asking if the word "unalienable" is used in the Constitution, it is not. However, the rights are set forth in the Bill of Rights, including speech, assembly, press, arms, search and seizure, warrant, testify against oneself, speedy trial, due process, grand jury indictment for certain crimes, jury trial for certain crimes, double jeopardy, etc.

Unalienable rights are more general -- life, liberty and pursuit of happiness.

The whole idea is that when a government becomes destructive of these ends, that the people have the right to alter or abolish it. People tend to suffer injustices and ills over time, rather than lightly or casually throw off a government. But, when a long train of abuses reduces the government to despotism, it is the right -- and the duty -- of the people to throw off that government and institute a better one.

Now, this doesn't mean that people are going to be allowed to institute insurrections. What it does mean is that people will, at some point, be so fed up that they will revolt, and that such revolts in the end, are just. But, the same people who wrote those ideas down in 1776, pledged their fortunes and their lives to the success of their revolution. Had they lost, they would have been deemed traitors, had their property confiscated, and been hanged or shot. This "right" to throw off government is not a guarantee that any complaint is just or that your revolution will be successful. It's merely a recognition of what we see to this day all around the world. At some point, like in Syria and such, the people have taken just about enough shit from the government, and they want to throw the damn thing off.

None of that is stated in the Constitution, because the Constitution is about forming the government, which folks hope never becomes what they were bitching about in the 1700s American colonies.

[Warren Dew]

I don't know if the original poster is still reading this thread, but here's a good summary of libertarianism:

[Gawdzilla Sama]

In other words, "I don't want to share."

[Warren Dew]

In other words, "I don't want to share."

More like, "I share without being forced to by the government."

[MrJonno]

Any ideology that puts freedom above all other concerns is evil, libertarianism is wrong from its very fundamental first principles

Ensuring people (ie everyone) gets food, shelter medical care and opportunities in life trump any freedom. Where its possible to have freedom and it doesn't interfere with this then fine if not then fuck freedom. Civilization is as much about what you have to do as it is about what you choose to do. You lose the right to have complete control of your own life when you choose to live in such a civilization.

Also what libertarianism mean by statism sane people consider to be society the basis of everything of value in modern life. Libertarians aren't anti state they are anti-social and in extreme cases sociopaths

[Gawdzilla Sama]

In other words, "I don't want to share."

More like, "I share without being forced to by the government."

Sounds like a cover to me.

[Woodbutcher]

I don't know if the original poster is still reading this thread, but here's a good summary of libertarianism:

I still read this. Even the derails. AND I'm learning.