If the knowledge of individual self-ownership is the river of all objective truth, then one of its major tributaries is the concept of human rights. Most humans err in their thinking on this topic because they are taught to do so by government and media.
Every human owns his or her body outright – this objective universal truth carries with it undeniable logical implications, many of which were discussed in the first treatise, including the right to own property. That right, like all human rights, exists wholly independent of the political state in which the human happens to live. The error in thinking humans are taught by their state is that it is the state itself that grants humans their rights. The self-serving nature of this lie is rather obvious; of course it is in the state’s interest to tell people only the state can grant humans rights.
We are taught that states do this “legitimately” by having a vaguely democratic government structure that then decides what rights individuals have by a majority vote. We aren’t taught about individual self-ownership in school, but we sure do get an earful of democracy, and “majority rule.” We are never taught to examine the concept of “majority rule,” and for good reason; it’s indistinguishable from mob rule.
It would have been easy to get a majority of Americans to vote in favor of rounding up all Arab-Americans and locking them in an internment camp on September 12, 2001 (and there’s even “legal” precedent!). Does that mean, in this hypothetical, that Arab-Americans who happened to be in the United States on that day suddenly lost their right to individual self-ownership? Of course not, it was just taken away from them by the rule of the mob and by the mob’s enforcers, the government and the police. Painting a veneer of government over monstrous actions doesn’t make them legitimate, it just serves to assuage the guilt those carrying them out – they’re just following orders, the government’s orders, the “will of the people.”
The concept of states being the thing which grants rights to individual humans is simply asinine. Are we really to accept that the state’s goofy rituals of electing congressmen who then haggle and wrangle over self-serving bills – while trying desperately to keep winning reelection so as to never have to get a real job – have the power to grant individual humans rights by writing them down on pieces of paper and putting them in the National Archive? That’s just silly.
Some processed wood pulp harvested from some random box elder and then etched with ink derived from a soybean field somewhere, when ritualistically combined with sufficient utterances of the magic word “aye,” confers upon me a right to, say, carry a handgun outside of my home? Or, that same ritual can be used to deny me the right to keep the property I already own? I already have the right to carry a handgun on my person as an extension of my absolute right to self-defense and property. And it wouldn’t matter what sort of tree the paper was made from, no ritual of men, no law, can legitimately deny me the right to keep my own property.
Every human being owns his or her own body. From this ownership flows the right to own property by mixing their labor with it as discussed previously. Today, when we fight over “rights” we’re typically only ever fighting over extensions of the right to own property or of self-ownership itself.
It’s embarrassing that it was only very recently Americans begrudgingly recognized the right of gay individuals to marry each other when each owns their own body and naturally has the right to voluntarily enter into such a civil contract that marriage functionally is.
It’s also embarrassing that the courts can’t figure out that a person who owns a business, whatever it is, has the right to decide with whom they’re going to voluntarily choose to do business. It’s a terrible business move for a bakery to refuse to make a wedding cake for a gay couple, but it is that business owner’s right to do so if they choose.
Every human being owns their own body, as such, no human ever has the right to initiate violence upon another (regardless of the costume they’re wearing). The only legitimate use of violence is in self-defense against such aggression. As an extension of a human’s ownership of his or her body and property needed to sustain their life, humans have the inherent right to own and employ tools for self-defense, including any and all firearms they can afford.
“Every human” doesn’t just mean American humans and it doesn’t just mean the guns the government lets American humans own now. “Every human” means every human in China has an absolute and undeniable right to own an M-60, .30-caliber general purpose machinegun. That they are prevented from doing so by their state doesn’t mean that they don’t have that right, they absolutely do, it simply means their government takes it away from them via threat of violence.
The state doesn’t create or grant rights, it merely takes them away. All human beings have the exact same set of basic human rights by virtue of being human beings who own their own body, the labor their body performs and all the fruits of that labor.
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