| | Hey everybody,
The U.S. Constitution is actually available to be read. Just use wiki...
- In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district where in the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defense.
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- Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.
- Ninth Amendment – Protection of rights not specifically enumerated in the Bill of Rights.
- The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
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- I'm still looking for where it restricts these rights to U.S. Citizens. "ALL criminal prosecutions ..." (emphasis added)
9th Amendment: Is there someone here who is arguing that rights derive from the state? I thought that states were supposedly instituted to protect "rights," implying that rights are derived independent of any state. In fact, I thought that "rights" as such were pretty clearly defined by Rand. She argued that a state was a necessary social mechanism for the defense of rights, but her derivation of rights as such stems from the moral requirement for taking action to sustain ones life qua man, not qua "citizen."
So, if rights are inherent in being a human, then all discussion so far that implies otherwise should be considered moot. I frankly don't see how it is that one "loses" ones rights, for that matter. If rights are inherent in being human, that is.
Rand: "Rights are moral principles defining and sanctioning a man's freedom of action in a social context"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objectivism_(Ayn_Rand)#Politics:_individual_rights_and_capitalism
But, note that this is a brief description, not a full-blown definition. I prefer my own version, which is consistent with Rand, but integrates some of her other discussion of the issue:
A right is a morally/ethically justifiable prohibition against interference with ones actions.
I.e., to claim that you have a right to speak, means that you can morally/ethically prohibit someone else from interfering with your speaking. As with all rights, it exists in a context.
For example, you do not have a right to shout out your opinions of a movie during its showing, in such a way as to force other people to lose their paid access to the movie. This presumes additional context: that they had a right to their money, that the theater owner had a property right to the theater, etc. If you were a Jew in Germany in the late 1930's and the NAZI owned or coerced theater was showing an anti-semite propaganda film, then likely you would have a right to shout out your disapproval and defiance, as the property rights that otherwise would prohibit you would themselves be invalid. To rephrase Proudhon, "Property is NOT theft." Or, "Theft cannot be property." Or, property stolen is not the property of the thieves.
Similarly, to claim a physical property right, eg., a car, there has to be implicitly a complex myriad of rights to a multitude of actions by millions of other people, digging up iron ore, creating a legal title system, on and on, but, fundamentally, all those rights bundled into a legal document representing you as the owner of the car, to be valid, have to satisfy the criteria that you can morally and ethically prohibit other people from interfering with your use of that car, derived from the necessity of your taking action to support your life and the similar rights of all the other people.
When one owes more than one owns - i.e., is bankrupt - that doesn't give your creditor the right to kill you, does it? A murderer is just another example of this. In common law type legal systems, such as Anglo-Saxon England or Iceland, committing a murder created an enormous debt to all the remaining victims - spouse, children, employer, employees, friends, as well as the legacy of the primary victim.
Whether it was that your barn had burned and you had no way to pay off the mortgage, or whether you killed or maimed someone, only if you refused to abide by the decision of the court that tried the case against you could you be subject to being legally killed in retaliation, and then, not as a legal directive for an execution, but rather simply that the court would make a determination that you were "Outside the law." I.e., an "outlaw."
No longer subject to the court's protection, you were thus vulnerable to any other person's decision to end your life without legal consequences. You hadn't lost your "rights," except for the specific contractual right to operate under the jurisdiction and legal sanction of the court.
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