McManigal: Most confused on human rights

Most people’s understanding of human rights is upside down and backward.

The question isn’t whether you have the right to own and to carry a gun or a sword; drive a car regardless of license or registration; make, sell, or buy meth; use your property as you see fit; smoke Cannabis; write, sing, or say whatever words you want to express; open a business; or anything else that has been claimed at one time or another to be a right.

Kent McManigal

The point is no one — regardless of any justification — has the right to forbid you to do any of those things.

All real rights are a right to not have something done to you.

Confusing the issue of rights is a way to control your thoughts and keep you thinking inside the box.

If people actually understood rights, the debate would be turned on its head; it would stop being about what you have a right to do, and become about what others have no right to do to you.

This is why the imaginary right to govern and control others can’t exist and therefore can’t be delegated to anyone under any condition — it is based on someone doing to others things they have no right to do.

Most people still believe in this kind of imaginary authority, though, and grasping sociopaths are eager to take advantage of this primitive, superstitious belief and gain political power — or to get hired.

Government extremists want to make you see rights as privileges; things to be doled out as rewards, or rented from bureaucrats. No one can demand you license a right without becoming the villain, themselves.

Anyone who claims to have such power is admitting to being a bully.

The only things you have no right to do are those things that violate the person or property of another. Violate, not offend. This means just about every law is stepping outside what anyone has a right to do by forbidding things that don’t violate person, property, or mutually voluntary choice.

You have no right to make up laws of this sort, and doing so anyway makes you the offender.

However, your right — for example — to own and to carry a gun doesn’t make me obligated to buy you one, nor pay for your ammunition. No one has a right to stand in your way of providing it for yourself, but that’s as far as it goes.

Farwell’s Kent McManigal champions liberty. Contact him at:

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