[107902] in Cypherpunks
RE: The land of the free.
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Matthew James Gering)
Wed Jan 27 20:16:34 1999
From: Matthew James Gering <mgering@ecosystems.net>
To: "Cypherpunks (E-mail)" <cypherpunks@cyberpass.net>
Date: Wed, 27 Jan 1999 16:07:55 -0800
Reply-To: Matthew James Gering <mgering@ecosystems.net>
[nice little 1st amendment speech by President Andrew Shepard ("American
President") snipped]
And then he turned around and said he's going for the guns. That he'd go
door to door if he had to. Not exactly what I call a consistent philosophy.
America *ought* to be inalienable rights. That was what it was founded on,
not "advanced citizenship" aka token freedom.
Matt
"Both oligarch and tyrant mistrust the people, and therefore deprive them of
their arms."
-- Aristotle, "Politics"
"What, then, is law? It is the collective organization of the individual
right to lawful defense.
Each of us has a natural right--from God--to defend his person, his liberty,
and his property. These are the three basic requirements of life, and the
preservation of any one of them is completely dependent upon the
preservation of the other two. For what are our faculties but the extension
of our individuality? And what is property but an extension of our
faculties?
If every person has the right to defend -- even by force -- his person, his
liberty, and his property, then it follows that a group of men have the
right to organize and support a common force to protect these rights
constantly. Thus the principle of collective right -- its reason for
existing, its lawfulness -- is based on individual right. And the common
force that protects this collective right cannot logically have any other
purpose or any other mission than that for which it acts as a substitute.
Thus, since an individual cannot lawfully use force against the person,
liberty, or property of another individual, then the common force -- for the
same reason -- cannot lawfully be used to destroy the person, liberty, or
property of individuals or groups.
Such a perversion of force would be, in both cases, contrary to our premise.
Force has been given to us to defend our own individual rights. Who will
dare to say that force has been given to us to destroy the equal rights of
our brothers? Since no individual acting separately can lawfully use force
to destroy the rights of others, does it not logically follow that the same
principle also applies to the common force that is nothing more than the
organized combination of the individual forces?
If this is true, then nothing can be more evident than this: The law is the
organization of the natural right of lawful defense. It is the substitution
of a common force for individual forces. And this common force is to do only
what the individual forces have a natural and lawful right to do: to protect
persons, liberties, and properties; to maintain the right of each, and to
cause justice to reign over us all. "
from _The Law_, by Frederick Bastiat
