HUMAN BEINGS BY THEIR NATURE ARE RIGHTS BEARERS! Ive been listening to Robert Sirico, a minister and author of the book, Defending the Free Market: The Moral Case for a Free Economy. Here are some excepts from his speech on natural law and liberty. He began by quoting Lord Acton who said, Liberty is the political end of man. Sirico says, The problem arises when we think that the total end of man is liberty, because liberty, after all, is a vacuum. Right. Its not virtue in itself. He says, But, in point of fact, think about liberty-not as a virtue, not as the goal of our lives-but as the context in which we can negotiate the goal of our life. And of course, the goal of all life is truth. He says, But its not liberty itself. You dont want to grasp for an empty thing. You have to fill liberty with something. Liberty gives us the context in which we can choose either virtue or vice. I think this is an important part of our movements heritage. In fact, its one of the unique things that the founding of the United States brought into political discussion, because prior to that, virtually every constitution, every political apparatus and construct spoke about some collective or some entity giving rights to people. Of course, if you give something to someone, you can also take it away from them. But the American founding had this insight, which comes from a much more ancient insight, that there was something inherent in the nature of the human person-that comes with the package-that he should have liberty, or she should have liberty. We recognize rights. We protect rights. We can also obfuscate rights and violate rights, but every human being is a rights bearer by his nature. He says, I basically use a kind of natural law framework, a grammar, if you will, that would express, I think, to any reasonable person why it is that human beings by their nature are rights bearers. And then if we can understand that, then and only then can we build a secure foundation for an understanding of liberty in our age, in our generation, in our day. He says that without an understanding of our inherent or natural rights, that anything we construct or build, no matter how elaborate or seemingly beautiful will be faulty, figuratively speaking. I say, no one can give us our rights and no one or no government can take them away. Our rights are natural rights-divine rights, given by natures God-and cannot be taken from us. Our rights can be assaulted or violated, our freedom to exercise our rights can be curtailed, but they are unalienable and cannot be taken away. We are engaged in a tumultuous battle in the war for liberty. We need to be careful with the words we use. If we say the government or state can take our rights, then we are delegating authority to the state that the government does not possess. And we are denying that human beings by our nature are rights bearers.
Posted on: Sun, 28 Dec 2014 03:13:20 +0000
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