Inherent rights. The inherent right of private ownership. The inherent right to discriminate.

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Website owner:  James Miller

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A basic principle of the free enterprise system is the right of private ownership. The Biblical commandment “Thou shall not steal” gives tacit validation to the idea of personal ownership. It implies the right of people to own things, the idea that a person can have exclusive rights to a thing. The rightness, justness of the idea of private ownership comes completely naturally. If thought about, it is obvious that it is an inherent right. In the days when men were hunting with clubs, spears, bows and arrows, if a man put a lot of time and work into making a spear (or bow and arrow) for himself, it is natural that he would consider it his, belonging exclusively to him, and that anyone else had no rights to it. That is the way he would naturally feel and the way any other fair minded person would feel. He made it and so it belongs to him. If someone took it away from him, that would be wrong — a crime constituting theft. The same is true if he made a clay cooking pot for himself or wove a blanket for himself. And the same is true if he grew a crop of wheat or barley for himself. He grew it. It belongs to him. He has an inherent right to it and no fair, sensible person would dispute that right. If he wants to sell it to someone else (or trade it to someone in exchange for something else), that is fine. Thus the free market system naturally evolved. Now suppose some addle minded ruler presumptiously decreed that everything that everyone made, created or grew belonged to the state and that the state could do with it as it pleased. How many spears or bows and arrows would be produced? How much wheat or barley would be grown? Things would be produced and grain would be grown only through the use of a whip and club. How much enthusiasm would go into the work being done? How much pride? Work would be done only under duress. How long would a state run in this way survive? Other states run in the more rational, sensible way based on the model of private ownership would outproduce them and overrun them. From ancient times, governments have taxed. How can governments justify taxation? A government can claim that there are some services that its people need that only a government can provide. Things like law and order and national defense. To provide these things it can legitimately claim that it must collect a certain amount of money from each citizen. Thus forcibly taking money from its citizens for such purposes can be justified. But how about simply taking money from one class of citizens and giving it to another class (i.e. redistributing wealth utilizing taxation as the tool)? Can that be justified? Or does that come under the category of arbitrary, legalized theft? Isn’t it the same as a presumptuous ruler arbitrarily expropriating one subject’s property and handing it to someone else? What kind of behavior would one call that? Who deserves what and how much they deserve, and the right to take one person’s possessions and give them to another, are moral judgments that no government has a right to make.

Modern America is infringing on the natural, inherent rights of man in many ways by a multitude of laws passed over the years by Congress. Anti-discrimination and affirmative action laws infringe on a person or business’s inherent rights. They are wrong. Discrimination is a natural part of life. We all discriminate all the time in all kinds of ways. We discriminate when we choose one store over another when we buy our groceries. We discriminate when we do business with one person but not another because we trust the one person but not the other. We discriminate when we like one person and are friendly to them and dislike another person and avoid them. We discriminate when we choose a particular person to marry (we are discriminating against all other potentials). If a particular area of a city has a reputation for violence and crime we may choose to avoid going into that part of the city. We are discriminating. If a particular group of people has developed a reputation for some bad thing (as Gypsies for stealing) our better judgment may influence our behavior in regard to that group. It may cause us to avoid them, to discriminate against them. If we have a business and our experience with hiring from some particular group of people has been consistently bad, it is just natural that we may start discriminating against that group in regard to hiring. It is just common sense. The same common sense that causes us to avoid a particular section of a city. We don’t know that if we go into a bad part of a city we will be mugged, but we avoid that part of the city because it is high risk. We may not know that a particular applicant from a particular group will be a problem for us, but our good judgment tells us to avoid people of that group. If some group has developed a reputation for ignorance, or for laziness, or for violence, or for being difficult to deal with, our good judgment may cause us to avoid hiring them. It is just the prudent, sensible thing to do. It is true that the consequence will be that our discrimination causes a few good people to suffer unfairly. They suffer because of the group’s bad reputation just as a good Gypsy may suffer because of that group’s reputation.

As we live life we form opinions about this thing and that thing. Discrimination arises from these opinions that we form. From our life experiences we make judgments. Those judgments result in discriminatory decisions.

Discrimination comes naturally and the right to discriminate is a natural, inherent right of all men. To outlaw discrimination is to infringe on one’s inherent right to act rationally and sensibly, to act in accordance with one’s conscience, judgment, or best interest. It is morally wrong.

The following is a quote from Cicero:

“True law is right reason in agreement with nature; it is of universal application, unchanging and everlasting; it summons to duty by its commands, and averts from wrong-doing by its prohibitions. And it does not lay its commands or prohibitions upon good men in vain, though neither have any effect on the wicked. It is a sin to try to alter this law, nor is it allowable to attempt to repeal any part of it, and it is impossible to abolish it entirely. We cannot be freed from its obligations by senate or people, and we need not look outside ourselves for an expounder or interpreter of it. And there will not be different laws at Rome and at Athens, or different laws now and in the future, but one eternal and unchangeable law will be valid for all nations and all times, and there will be one master and ruler, that is, God, over us all, for he is the author of this law, its promulgator, and its enforcing judge. Whoever is disobedient is fleeing from himself and denying his human nature, and by reason of this very fact he will suffer the worst penalties, even if he escapes what is commonly considered punishment.”

All of the anti-discrimination and affirmative action laws that America has been making over the years are on the wrong side of Truth and Justice. They are not just. They are unjust. They don’t reflect true law, God’s law. They reflect the kind of law that one would expect to find in a wicked, depraved Sodom that doesn’t know right from wrong. What has been the effect of these laws? Anger, resentment, hatred, strife, lawsuits for one thing (the kind of things one would expect from unjust laws). But they have brought a whole lot more than these. They have brought great inefficiencies because people can no longer simply be guided by their best judgments. Fear of lawsuits causes them to act in a very different way from the way they would normally act. That is why you encounter organizations which are totally dysfunctional, where everything is garbled, where the employees can almost be counted on to “mess up” (i.e. the organization is staffed with incompetents). What has happened? The people in charge of hiring are given the ground rules on how to hire and they just follow the rules they were given. If they hire the worst instead of the best, it isn’t their fault. They only did as they were instructed. The cost of all the inefficiencies just gets added on to the price of the product.

I see a court system in the United States which, in my mind, in not dealing out justice — it is dealing out high injustice. It is issuing decisions which are simply obscene.

I reflect on the following: Things that are immoral and wrong (such as fornication, adultery, and homosexuality) are all legal in our society. These are things that have great social consequences, they do great harm, and there are no laws against them. There is no social pressure or inclination to legislate against them. On the other hand, things that ought to be legal (like the right to use your own judgment and good sense in dealing with others) are subject to all kinds of state meddling and restrictions. What is going on? Is there some kind of moral inversion here?

The state insists on putting its nose into things that prudence would require staying away from. It tries to regulate things that are intangibles such as intent and motivation, something a sensible person would not attempt. Unable to prove intent, it resorts to things like affirmative action and quotas. The state acts stupidly by enacting bad laws and then everyone lives under state intimidation. That is no way to live. I find this government terribly oppressive. Who is responsible for it all? The radical left. The radical left has created a climate of division, bias and hatred. It has accomplished nothing good. It has created a mess. It has poisoned America. It has ruined America. The good things in America all come from technology and the natural workings of capitalism. The bad things come from the government. They come from eggheads who think they know more than anyone else and try to force their ideas on others. The eggheads get into power and are a curse on everyone. The masses are gullible and vote them in.

Nov 2014