- I've been thinking about rights. I sometimes think that the only right we really need is The Right To Be Left Alone (MPR). There are Individualists Who Believe similar things. Mostly these articles talk about more traditional privacy rights, but I think one of the bigger problems is government protecting us from ourselves. If we truly have the right to be left alone, there are a great many laws on the books that infringe that right.
- On the other hand, the right to self-defense is pretty important, and would allow you to be sure you're left alone, as long as you have the right to defend yourself against the government. Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to be how things work today.
- A Right to Self-Defense Against Criminals and Despots goes into great length about the right of people to defend themselves against their government. In Missouri, Proposition B, which affirmed The Natural Right of Self Defense, was rejected by 52 to 48 percent. There's more information in general at capitalism.org's Gun control and the right to self-defense page. I think defending ourselves against despots may be more important than defending against more common criminals.
- Goodbye, Blue Sky is a discussion about the War on Drugs over at kuro5hin. I'm pretty sure the War on Drugs is currently the single biggest excuse for government attacking our rights, but another excuse would present itself if that wasn't available.
- And as for the French Declaration that I used as the title of this piece (it was a tough call, but Tom Paine's Rights of Man is much weightier), I think they only needed number 4: Liberty consists in the freedom to do everything which injures no one else; hence the exercise of the natural rights of each man has no limits except those which assure to the other members of the society the enjoyment of the same rights. These limits can only be determined by law. They probably could have even left off the last sentence with no ill effects.