The modern concept of "rights" came from the French Philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
Government cannot create. It can only reduce, remove, restrict, steal, take, or destroy. It may provide, but only by taking from another.
AMEN!
I submit that the right to bear arms and the freedom of the press ARE God given rights, also.
You sre commended for toy using the word "only"
"the extended order arises out of a competitive process in which success decides, not the approval of a great mind, a committee, or a God, or conformity with some understood principle of individual merit."
"To understand our civilization, one must appreciate that the extended order resulted not from human design or intention but spontaneously; it arose from unintentionally conforming to certain traditional and largely moral practices, many of which men tend to dislike, whose significance they usually fail to understand, whose validity they cannot prove, and which have nonetheless fairly rapidly spread the means of an evolutionary selection -- the comparative increase of population and wealth -- of those groups that happened to follow them."
- F. A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit
A government cannot, by definition, grant rights. Governments receive their authority by permission of the governed or by force of arms, and after that point they only administrate rights. I wouldn't even go so far as to call them "rights". I would classify them as "enacted social privileges".
No. It ain't the government.
The Founders even recognized that "rights" came from a Higher Power, The Creator, not from government. They knew that government had to recognize rights, not abridge them.
All we have of freedom, all we use or know -
This our fathers bought for us long and long ago.
Ancients Rights unnoticed as the breath we draw-
Leave to live by no man's leave, underneath the Law-
Lance and torch and tumult, steel and grey-goose wing,
Wrenched it, inch and ell and all, slowly from the King.
Till our fathers 'stablished, after bloody years,
How our King is one with us, first among his peers.
So they bought us freedom-not at little cost-
Wherefore must we watch the King: lest our gain be lost.
The poem goes on but you have the idea. The freedoms that we enjoy today were bought by our fathers and their sons long and long ago.
It gets better. In America, citizens surrended exercise of only certain natural individual rights for an equivalent civil right. This was a compact, as every citizen surrendered the same. For example, it is a natural right to defend yourself. When you have mixed your body labor with an object, (by extension) It is your natural right to defend your property. The individual surrenders that natural right of being judge, jury and executioner in his own defense for an equivalent civil process for the protection of self and property. That for which he does not receive a civil equivalent, he does not surrender, but retains. Eminent Domain and the fifth Amendment to the Constitution maintains this promise of a social compact, ensuring that every individual receives an equivalent (is made whole in his estate) for his loss.
Because of the compact, the individual is protected from the will of the majority. Further, the English heritage of American common law has carried forward an understanding of the "rights of Englishmen" from which government is precluded from trampling upon.
The French believed that all natural rights were surrendered in exchange for civil rights - the "bargain" was not in the form of a compact, but more of a contract between government and the individual. This form of government has become the European socialist model where the paramount welfare of the majority always governed an individual's civil rights.
Excellent post Char.
No human invention could provide us with something so divine as freedom.
"He who the Son sets free is free indeed." Christ's death broke the last hold on mortality, He conquered death and the grave and death lost its "sting." All anyone can do to us ultimately, is to kill this body. In so doing, we are set free even from that restriction.