The right not to employ someone

Yeah, I guess he can get points for that. I say that rather grudgingly, however, lol!

Very grudgingly..............

Guess what, -- every time some dick tries to infringe on individual freedoms on his private property, some other dick takes him to court, resulting in more rules & regulations.

I don't know about you but I blame that on the courts, not the citizen who tried to keep solicitors off his property. You don't blame the victim.

If a shopping mall has to allow one group to set up a card table to harass the customers, then they have to allow a thousand. And the court says it was unreasonable to ask them to leave. This is what happens when you don't give people the right to control their property, things get out of control.

This is what happens when we don't respect property rights. You can't keep order on your property. Submit or die. Let the mobs rule. If the gangs want to inhabit your land, there is nothing you can do about it because if you try to keep thugs out of your establishment you will pay a heavy price if the court says it wasn't "reasonable".

I just read yesterday that kids are getting so out-of-control in New Hampshire that that one shopping mall is banning underage teens with gang attire from the premises without their parents. Wait till the Supreme Court gets that one.

I hope you live in California, pal, you deserve it. I hope the rest of the country doesn't follow that state into the abyss.

I'll give you the last word. It's pretty obvious where you are coming from and where you want this country to go.

Goodbye.

I just read yesterday that kids are getting so out-of-control in New Hampshire that that one shopping mall is banning underage teens with gang attire from the premises without their parents. Wait till the Supreme Court gets that one.

Like as not, the USSC may uphold a dress code. - It's a reasonable rule.
And the New Hampshire 'Free State' idea is probably the last best chance of restoring some sanity to the 'States Rights' issue. They advocate that fed/state/local governments ALL be required to support our Constitution, just as are citizens.

I hope you live in California, pal, you deserve it.

That type of attitude explains why I'm not your 'pal'. -- Everyone in the USA should support Californians in their efforts against the 'states rights' agenda.

I hope the rest of the country doesn't follow that state into the abyss.

Coulda fooled me. A lot of your opinions here echo the current authoritarian statist line.

I'll give you the last word. It's pretty obvious where you are coming from and where you want this country to go. Goodbye.

Thanks for your inept last shot. See ya kid.

Changing Conceptions of Rights in the
United States and the West
Daniel J. Elazar

The idea of individual rights as the basis for political organization, and the protection of those rights as a major task of government, - in itself represents only one conception of rights and must be understood as such.

Prior to the American Revolution, the rights of individuals had been associated with particular traditions. Even the idea of inalienable rights was rare. For the most part citizenship and the protections it afforded were associated with obligations and granted liberties.

The concept of obligations developed the idea of liberties. Liberties could be collective or individual and are reflected in the development of medieval republicanism.

Individuals functioned within intergenerational groups, whether peoples, corporations or associations and gained their status, obligations and liberties from their position in their group.

What is characteristic of premodern republican systems of obligations and liberties was that what moderns came to understand as protected rights, adhering to the individual, in premodern time were derived from obligations to do justice that adhered to collectivities as collectivities.

A principal characteristic of modernity is the shattering of that framework and its replacement by the concept of individualism, including individual rights.

This concept was introduced into political philosophy at the very beginning of the modern epoch in the middle of the seventeenth century by Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and their peers.
In their break with classical philosophy, they replaced the concept of natural law, which reinforced the corporatist model, with one of natural right which opened the door to the idea of individual rights.
By the mid-eighteenth century, the idea of natural right had been supplemented in the political realm by the idea of natural rights, an idea that reached its apogee in the Virginia Declaration of Rights, the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America, the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, and the first ten amendments to the United States Constitution.

Individual rights derive from and are vested in the natural order to which natural law speaks. Humans must assume obligations in order to survive -- so goes the theory -- but in linking them to rights, the latter are given precedence.

That is to say, every individual human being by nature has rights, but because those rights must be protected in civil society, humans take on obligations as a practical part of rights protection.

The idea of individual rights has undergone further changes, both in terms of the understanding of how "rights" protect the individual against all corporate entities, not only government or the state, and with regard to what constitutes rights.

The changes that have taken place may have made late twentieth century American civil society as different in its conception of rights from the founding generation as the latter was from the late medieval expressions of obligations and liberties.

During the colonial period what we today refer to as the protection of rights was principally the acknowledgement and protection of liberties, which in the United States goes back at least as far back as the Puritan settlement of New England in the 1630s. The issue was sharpened in the Glorious Revolution in England in 1689 and the Whig tradition that emerged from it. The Whigs, influenced by Locke, changed the terms of the debate from liberties to rights.

Here we encounter the roots of the struggle between federal and natural liberty. Federal liberty bridges between the premodern and modern conceptions of rights and recognizes the relationship between obligation and right.
Abraham Lincoln declared in the Lincoln-Douglas debates that there is no right to do wrong.

He was arguing from a position of federal liberty which seems to have been the basis of his position on the subject throughout his life.

The first American state constitutions, written during the Revolution, used the term rights instead of liberties, but they were declarations of eternal principles rather than specifically binding constitutional law.

At first the United Colonies, later the United States, followed the same pattern, beginning with the Declaration of Rights of the Stamp Act Congress in 1765.
The Bill of Rights marked a new departure. No longer content with declarations of eternal principles, from the first it was considered to be binding constitutional law.

The original state bills or declarations of rights of the Revolutionary period reflected the hidden or open assumption that every individual was part of a community and as such was bound by certain communitarian obligations.
Separately, the community was obligated to secure that individual's life, liberty, property, and the rights that flowed from them. They reflected the sense that natural law and rights meant a natural order.

Whatever sense of rights as including obligations that has survived in the United States has survived within the states.

By 1791, then, two great transitions had taken place with regard to rights in American history:
the first substantive, from the late medieval conception of liberties to a modern conception of rights;
and the second procedural, from the idea that rights can at best be protected through hortatory declarations to the idea that they can be protected through binding constitutional law.

Part and parcel of the conception of the protection of rights in the writing of the U.S. Constitution was the principle embodied in the Constitution as originally written before the Bill of Rights was added, namely that the best way to protect rights was through proper institutions.

While the Bill of Rights went beyond that principle and even changed the terms of the debate, from the adoption of the Constitution to the Civil War the view that individual rights were constitutional rights, to be protected through proper employment of proper institutions, dominated American rights thinking.

In general this was a period when the idea of natural rights gave way to that of constitutional rights with the task of institutions to protect the latter.

Only those who doubted that American institutions could do so, appealed beyond the Constitution to eternal rights, natural or divine.

In this respect, Hamilton and Madison's argument in The Federalist against a federal bill of rights had a life long beyond its rejection in the debate over the ratification of the 1787 constitution.

Like most Federalist ideas, it was rapidly diffused among the states, especially, but not exclusively, the new ones.

Ironically, from the Federalists' perspective, the states became the principal arena for the use of institutions to secure rights.

Through legal reforms, the law as an institution was reformulated to allow the free incorporation of private associations including private corporations and labor unions.

This represented a radical change from common law and colonial practice where every significant association had to receive a special charter from the legislature (an extension of the granting of a liberty).

Benevolent reforms, such as reforms in the care of the insane, the poor, and the aged, were also designed to secure rights in a positive way.

Legislatures did more for the protection of rights than courts, and these were mostly state legislatures.
Federal involvement was principally confined to certain regulatory matters affecting interstate commerce.

This period culminated in the adoption of the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments which further clarified and concertized the constitutional basis of individual rights, what constituted individual rights within the body politic, and provided means for the enforcement of those rights.

It was then that private property was raised in status to become the principal institution for maintaining rights in the minds of many.

"Property" should be understood as a bundle of powers and opportunities.
The ability to own and control the use of property was always considered very important, at least as an auxiliary means or precaution, and was so recognized throughout the colonial and early national periods of American history.
However, after the end of the Civil War, property rights were elevated to centrality in the definition of what were the primary individual rights, a position they were to hold almost indisputedly for a generation and then, although strongly disputed, were to remain the basis for constitutional law doctrines for yet another.

Here, too, there were two dimensions. Property rights were defined to be the most important of all constitutional rights and the protection of those rights was defined as the principal means of protecting all individual rights.
In many respects this was a product of the needs of an advancing capitalist system, made possible by the elimination of slavery from the property rights argument.

In other words, the Southerners had raised the property rights argument in defense of slavery prior to the Civil War but, because so many Northerners opposed slavery, unrestricted support of property rights was unpalatable for them.
After the war period, they could look at property rights without that burden.

The other point of emphasis was that of due process.

Going hand in hand with the special status of property rights was the elevation of the right of contract to the same status.

The U.S. Supreme Court invoked the Fourteenth Amendment to extend "right of contract" protections into whole new areas.

The idea of individual rights as civil rights triumphed in the 1950s and 1960s,
At the same time, civil rights increasingly came to mean individual rights in the starkest sense, that is to say, the right of every individual to be free of all but the most minimum external constraints, certainly from all group constraints as distinct from governmental ones deemed absolutely necessary for the maintenance of law and order.

In other words, privacy in certain matters cannot be abridged no matter how nominally proper the procedures used to abridge it might be.
This is certainly the argument of the pro-choice forces on the abortion issue.

Moreover, governments were forced to redefine and restrict their definition of what restraints were necessary to maintain law and order.

Whereas in the colonial period the idea that the fabric of society had to be kept intact, even at the expense of individual liberties and rights, was all powerful, even in the national period from 1789 to the late 1940s, the maintenance of the social fabric was given equal billing with individual rights.
After 1948 or thereabouts, maintaining the social fabric became distinctly secondary if not incidental in the face of individual rights challenges.

Thus, as the idea of civil rights was winning its greatest victories, conceptually it was being replaced by a new idea gaining currency in the world, that of human rights.

To recapitulate, the prevailing premodern conception was one of obligations and liberties.

The modern conception began with individual rights in natural law, with nature the basis of universal order. Natural order in this sense includes obligations, but either does not link them with rights or gives rights precedence.

The modern view was that natural rights were self-evident, but had to be discovered if they were to be transformed into political realities. Once discovered, they could then be extended by interpretation. In that system God was present as the justification.

The moderns discovered that natural law alone is not enough. Rights that are universal by natural law serve nobody since they are unenforcable.

Therefore they transformed the principles of natural right into positive law to overcome the difficulties of agreement as to their sources.
Different people understood rights as derived from different sources. Some still sought a Divine source, others a source in nature with Divine sanction, and still others a source in a self-propelled nature.

Regardless of the differences of opinion as to source, it was possible in the real world to obtain agreement about what was desired in the way of rights. Through consent, these agreements were embodied in positive law. Hence, consent became the critical dimension in transforming natural rights into enforcable measures.
In a sense, the minimum consent necessary was consent to the Hobbesian covenants of peace which Hobbes proposed almost precisely in that spirit as the minimum around which all men could agree as necessary for their survival.

It is important to note the relationship between rights and consent. Rights may be authoritative, but in practice they only have authority when accepted by the consent of the governed. Thus, consent is the bridge between abstract rights and concrete behavior of civil society.

Modern natural rights had three dimensions: rights as justice, rights as liberties, and rights as exceptions.

The first, rights as justice, had to do with social order as a whole, how it became a just order and how individuals received justice within it;

the second, rights as liberies, had more to do with individuals and what they were free or not free to do in civil society;

while the third, [rights as exceptions], represented civil society's release of individuals from obligations.

Contemporary theories of rights are results-oriented. They are justified by the way they justify the cases they like.

The new doctrine of rights treats the moral autonomy of the individual as an absolute. individual rights are trumps over the perceived public good.

This is the total reversal of the earlier understanding of rights as growing out of civil society as well as nature.
Under such circumstances, civil society concepts have very little standing.

Under the original theory, constitutions, while they could be interpreted often with great liberality and flexibility, still had a veto over actions that went beyond a certain point, i.e., were unconstitutional.

That, indeed, was the whole purpose of a constitution.

The above are 'on point' excerpts from:

Changing Conceptions of Rights in the United States and the West

Address:http://www.jcpa.org/dje/articles/rights-us.htm

He can voice that unreasonable condition, but he certainly does not have the power to search my car to see if I've complied

No, but he has the right to demand you leave his property if you refuse to submit to the search.

In fact, I see no reason or obligation to honor his dishonorable request. -- I would ignore it, & fish away, weapon at hand.

One of three things can happen in that situation: 1) he will call the police and they will arrest you (or shoot you if you brandish a weapon), 2) he will remove you physically and have the legal right to use deadly force since you have brandished a weapon while trespassing on private property or 3) you will shoot him and find yourself convicted of murder and, in some States, your actions will make you eligible for the death penalty.

In other words, you would agree to his terms and then go back on your word?

I didn't agree to his terms. -- He has no 'property right' to disarm me. -- You've invented that 'right.'

Very Clintonian. He is not disarming you in any way. You are not obligated to come onto his property. You are voluntarily asking a property owner for permission to use his property. He has laid out certain conditions for that use. By agreeing to those conditions to his face but carrying a concealed weapon, you are not only a liar, but also a criminal.

You're parsing again. His 'terms' attempt to disarm me. I don't accept those terms, I ignore them.

Under any view of contract law, by coming onto his property after hearing his conditions for the use of that property, you are agreeing to those conditions. You cannot say "But I didn't really mean it."

My husband was flabergasted that anyone would so blatantly abuse the rules of another property owner like this.

The strange thing is, most gun owners are also strong supporters of private property rights. If you told the average NRA member that you believe that you can carry a firearm onto someone else's private property against their wishes, he would consider you either incredibly rude or crazy.

He can voice that unreasonable condition, but he certainly does not have the power to search my car to see if I've complied

No, but he has the right to demand you leave his property if you refuse to submit to the search.

True enough, he has the power to demand I leave. In that case I would leave.
However, I see no reason or obligation to honor his initial dishonorable request [to arrive unarmed] -- I would ignore it, & fish away, weapon at hand in my car or on my person.

One of three things can happen in that situation: 1) he will call the police and they will arrest you (or shoot you if you brandish a weapon), 2) he will remove you physically and have the legal right to use deadly force since you have brandished a weapon while trespassing on private property or 3) you will shoot him and find yourself convicted of murder and, in some States, your actions will make you eligible for the death penalty.

Get a grip on your control fantasies. I would leave before submitting to a psychos 'search'.

In other words, you would agree to his terms and then go back on your word?

I didn't agree to his terms. -- He has no 'property right' to disarm me. -- You've invented that 'right.'

Very Clintonian. He is not disarming you in any way.

He's not? You're simply denying his intent.

You are not obligated to come onto his property. You are voluntarily asking a property owner for permission to use his property. He has laid out certain conditions for that use.

That's your imagined scenario now. You initially proposed quite another.

By agreeing to those conditions to his face but carrying a concealed weapon, you are not only a liar, but also a criminal.

You've set up this scenario to claim I'm a liar.. Now I'm somehow a criminal as well? Good grief M-man, get a grip on your hype.

You're parsing again. His 'terms' attempt to disarm me. I don't accept those terms, I ignore them.

Under any view of contract law, by coming onto his property after hearing his conditions for the use of that property, you are agreeing to those conditions. You cannot say "But I didn't really mean it."

I just posted some material on the "doctrine of unconstitutional conditions".. It applies to private contracts, as you well know. -- Such 'conditions' can be ignored.

Modernman wrote:

The strange thing is, most gun owners are also strong supporters of private property rights.

And if ALL property owners agreed to prohibit guns [defacto 'private' gun control] do you think such strange property rights would be supported?

If you told the average NRA member that you believe that you can carry a firearm onto someone else's private property against their wishes, he would consider you either incredibly rude or crazy.

It's crazy to deny that there is a movement to privatize gun control, imo.
Some people can get quite rude in their denials of that fact..

"Doctrine" bump. -- See 434.

And if ALL property owners agreed to prohibit guns [defacto 'private' gun control] do you think such strange property rights would be supported?

By the average NRA supporter? Certainly.

Dream on.

Although, since the NRA supported the '68 gun control act', I'll grant the organization could once again be subverted.