Existing Rights, Protected Rights

Oh deary me. Someone needs an education in the difference between rights existing and rights protected.

First off, the government does provide the right to free-speech in nearly the same manner it might provide the right to healthcare. In the pre-governmental or natural state that Goldberg seems to refer to, anybody can silence anybody else. It is only through government regulation (i.e. the First Amendment and its interpretations) and civilization that people can have free speech. Similarly, people would have healthcare before the existence of government regulation, but maybe not as much as they deserve.

The lack of protection on the pre-existing right to free speech DOES NOT mean it was not already there. During pre-civilized times, the right to free speech was anarchistic. Like the blogger says, "anyone can silence anybody else", but you could also say anything you wanted.

The Left has the problem of seeing individual rights as, in a sense, physical objects. They see rights having proportions and weight and, of course, the ability to be manipulated. And, with our legal system, LEGAL rights have the ability to be modified or destroyed. But, moral rights, the same rights the blogger and the Left are both professing to believe in (when it comes to UHC) and trying to destroy (when it comes to everything else), are untouchable and eternal. They are the rights that we have as natural beings. They are not dreamy democratic positive rights, like right to a home and all that jazz, but the basic things all humans have at birth: speech, life, self-defense, etc. They can exist within protection, like our Constitution, but they also exist outside protection and be suppressed at will.

The key to understand natural rights is to understand the power of force. At its most basic, government is an institution based on the mass use of force to achieve ends. A nation like ours, born of a philosophy respecting natural rights, has many protections, as well as our culture having these rights sown into it. The government, while slowly chipping away at them, has only at the most chaotic of times attempted to outright remove the protections on these rights with its massive force. In other countries, like Germany, respect for natural rights have been minimal. Only in the last 50 years have any of the German people had any real cultural experience with natural rights. Today's democratic German government has strict laws various things we take for granted today, like free association and speech. The citizenry's ability to resist this force and to assert its own force, best shown through decentralized democratic government, is how America has lasted over 200 years without any of the destructive political upheaval that the rest of the world has experienced.