Governments Do NOT Grant You Rights

Chapter 11.4: Where rights don’t come from, 2

Chapter 11.4

3. What government can give cannot be defined as a right

Whatever rights are, people want them secured—a service that some governments claim to provide by means of laws and systems of justice. There’s just one problem: what government giveth, government can taketh away.

There was a time when the American government, and governments elsewhere in the world, held that slavery was legal. By law, certain people did not enjoy the right to be free, or to own themselves or the work of their own hands.

Today, by contrast, your right not to be enslaved is protected by law. So how would you feel if the government that “granted” that right suddenly decided to revoke it? While you’re being dragged off, would you blithely say, “Oh well, I guess I no longer have the right not to be enslaved”? Is that really how you understand the concept of rights, down deep in your soul?

According to the World Health Organization, there are more than 200 million girls and women alive today, in 30 countries across Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, who have been victims of a cultural practice called female genital mutilation. Most people reading these words would find the details of what is done to these women, and why, quite horrifying. And yet it is done to millions of girls, usually between birth and the age of 15.¹