The most basic brick in the foundation of our American society is that life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are the self-evident, inalienable rights of every human being.
What does self-evident mean? It means that these rights are known to be true and do not have to be proven. Inalienable means that they cannot be taken away but human laws.
There are more self-evident, inalienable rights that we enjoy as humnas, but let’s focus on the three that are laid out in the Declaration of Independence, the document that defined the foundation for our United States.
I’m going to start with Liberty.
Claude responded: Liberty is the state of being free — from external control, oppression, or unjust restriction — to live, think, speak, and act according to your own will, with…
Liberty is the state of being free — from external control, oppression, or unjust restriction — to live, think, speak, and act according to your own will, within limits that protect the same freedom for others.
It shows up in a few overlapping ways:
Personal liberty — freedom over your own body, mind, and choices. The idea that you are the rightful author of your own life.
Political liberty — freedom from tyrannical government; the right to participate in the rules that govern you.
Civil liberty — specific protected freedoms like speech, religion, assembly, and due process.
Philosophical liberty — sometimes called free will; the question of whether humans genuinely have the capacity to choose, or whether choice is an illusion.
The classic tension in the concept: your liberty ends where mine begins. Almost every political and ethical debate about freedom is really a debate about where that line gets drawn.
Think about which of these types inalienable rights you actually enjoy. I would argue that overtime, the government has eroded all of these the inalienable rights to liberty and have acted against the declarations that our founding fathers wrote.
We tell women what ‘decisions’ she can make about her body. We incarcerate people who have darker skin colors, often without due process or probably cause. We punish those who express unpopular opinions. We ruin the lives of those who don’t vote the way we want them to. We have been brainwashed into thinking we have free will and choices when all of the choices we make end up being the ones that power and greed want us to make.
Note that I say We. We are responsible for this. Even if you are one of those people that have voted against the things that have destroyed our foundation, it’s still the collective We that did this to oursevles. We have to take responsibility in order to fix this. If we don’t take responsibility, no one will.
Now let’s talk about life. Every human has the inalienable right to life. That’s a pretty easy concept to accept (for most, I’m leaving the mentally ill ideas of master race creation, mass genocide, and war out of the equation for the. moment)
So if we have the right to life, how can we put a condition of being able to pay for it? Stay with me, it sounds like a stretch, I know. The concept of money is not natural, it is a construct of man to solve the problem of the equitable distribution of resources, although it certainly does not do a good job of it. The ‘cost of living’ concept really was designed for comparison purposes of geographical areas, but when you boil it down, there really is a cost of living in our society. It costs money to get food. It costs money to get heat and air. Water costs money, medical attention costs money, clothing costs money. There is a minimum amount of money that is needed in order for a human to keep living. This is the cost of living, to have life. Remember life? That inalienable, self-evident right that we all have?
Given this line of reason, every human in the United States has the self-evident, inalienable right to have life and everything that supports it – including food, water, medical care, clothing, heat or air. This is supposed to be a basic tenant our of society.
Resources should be shared with all. We are at a point where a small number of people control all of the resources and there is no way they could use them all even if they tried. Until everyone has the right to the basic necessities that sustain life, the rich must be taxed.