David McElroy

Where does your right to free speech come from? Most people would say it comes from the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Where does the your right to own weapons come from? Most people would say that right is created by the Second Amendment. If you’re among those who would answer that way, you’re mistaken. Let’s talk about why.

A right is something you’re born with simply because you’re a human being. Those who recognize natural rights — including me — assert that the same rights apply to every single person, wherever he lives and whether he’s allowed to exercise his rights or not. We assert that every human being has the natural right to his own life and to the property which he morally acquires or creates.

Because of that, the right to free speech has existed forever, whether any government recognizes it or not. In the same way, you have the natural right to be completely free, as long as you’re not infringing on the rights of others to live their own lives and control their own property. No government document creates that right. A government document can only recognize what already exists. (And the fraud known as the Social Contract is just a lie.)

Read the text of the Declaration of Independence. The men who laid the foundation for independence from Great Britain were very explicit about rights being natural and pre-existing: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” The statement further asserts that the purpose of government is to “secure these rights.” So the purpose of government is to protect the natural and unalienable rights that every person is born with. Remember that this was written before anybody ever conceived of the Constitution’s Bill of Rights.

Over the last hundred years or so, a peculiar idea sprang up from the Progressive movement. These people somehow came up with the odd notion that rights exist only if a government creates them and gives them to you. Barack Obama is among the people holding this peculiar view. You can see it in much of what he does or says, but here’s a quote that makes it very clear that he believes government creates rights and that he believes government can take away rights.

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In 1933, the National Socialist Party had gained enough votes in the German parliament that Adolph Hitler won the post of chancellor. Because Germany didn’t have a winner-take-all system for a leader as we do, it wasn’t that sort of election. But Hitler gained power legitimately through the electoral system.

In the coming months, Hitler used every excuse he could to bully the Reichstag into passing laws giving him absolute power. In other words, Hitler used the legal political system to gain power. His goons certainly did work behind the scenes that was illegal, in order to scare Germans into believing they needed him, but the correct legal authorities gave him power.

At what point did Hitler go from being a popular and democratically elected politician to being a dictator? Is there really a difference?

From the early days of the country, U.S. presidents have used so-called “executive orders” to do things which Congress hadn’t specifically authorized. Some of those things were benign and followed directly with the intent of Congress. In other cases, presidents seized powers that they absolutely didn’t have. For instance, Franklin Roosevelt issues an executive order giving power to the military to round up Americans whose ancestry was Japanese. There was no legal authority for this. He simply did it. And nobody stopped him.

Was he a dictator? In what ways do the unilateral actions of a U.S. president differ from the unilateral, dictatorial actions of Hitler?

On Wednesday, we expect to see Barack Obama issue executive orders which are aimed at preventing you and me from owning weapons which he doesn’t approve of. He plans to surround himself with children from across the country; in a disgusting display of dishonesty and cynicism, he’s going to pretend that he’s taking these actions because these children have asked him to make them safe. (As far as I know, he has no plans to ban the automobiles and bathtubs which are far more of a danger to them statistically, but that’s another matter.)

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Democrats and Republicans manufactured an end-of-the-year crisis that they declared must be solved or disaster was imminent. Without a budget deal to stop automatic spending cuts, the entire country would go over a cliff, they claimed, presumably destroying us all. Their last-second solution was to pass huge tax increases and cut almost nothing from the budget. Is anyone naive enough to be surprised?

I’m not going to dissect the deal. Frankly, I don’t care enough to. If you just want to be outraged over the tax increases and the groups getting favors, there are plenty of places that’ll oblige you. I’d like to ask a much bigger and more fundamental question.

Are you ready to give up on politics? Are you ready to quit pretending that it makes a difference who you vote for or whose election you work for? Are you ready to quit wasting your time, money and effort on a losing effort?

I know plenty of good people who believed that if they worked for Republican candidates who promised to oppose taxes and promised to trim the size of government, things would change. There were a lot of people who had faith in the Tea Party movement to change things, even though the actual philosophy behind the Tea Party types became more and more muddled over time. If you’re among those people, do you see now that your time and work and money was wasted?

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