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Comment by notepad0x90 | Hacker News Reader

Think of the basic needs of a human being. Buying food and water, paying for shelter and living in a safe environment. For these things, proving one's identity should not be required, nor should a person be required to do business with a 3rd party (banks and credit cards) or have their activity tracked and surveilled. A person's right to exist and to pursue continued existence is inalienable and beyond the authority of a government or society to regulate.

Other things like transportation, certain types of employment and participation in government, I can see why a national id would be required for those.

Does the government (any government) have the authority to require identity proof from a person, simply because that person exists?

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> A person's right to exist and to pursue continued existence is inalienable and beyond the authority of a government or society to regulate.

Natural/inalienable rights are a fiction. No one has any rights unless someone with guns is willing to enforce those rights. And hopefully the people with guns have some checks and balances on them such that they can't use their guns to violate those rights themselves.

I think it's great that we have (some) governments that have some list of human rights enumerated in their laws and founding documents. But even then, rights are protected unevenly.

> Does the government (any government) have the authority to require identity proof from a person, simply because that person exists?

That depends on what you mean by "authority". If you're talking about moral authority, then I'd probably agree with you that no, they don't. But in the end the authority that matters in reality is the kind you get by wielding a gun; under that definition, governments have all the authority they need to do stuff like that.

You are presenting the government as being some external entity, not one chosen by will of the people. We have it like this because apparently most of the people got fed up with wielding their own guns all day long, and preferred to delegate that.

I don't understand the argument you're making. How does whether you wield a gun correspond to whether you choose your government? Unless you choose your representatives by pointing your gun at people and telling them "be my member of congress, or else".

In any case, I absolutely agree with the parent that rights don't just exist as some platonic ideal, but rather need to be enforced in an organized manner, and I haven't seen any case yet of that being achieved without a representative government.

A practical and realistic point of view that you rarely meet today, thanks for writing my comment.

The pro private gun ownership argument.

you're right about force being the ultimate authority, if a government derives it's powers from it's force alone you would be right. but even in dictatorial regimes, the dictator needs support from various underlings and factions. But in the context of western democracy, governments derive their authority from the consent of the governed. In that context, no such authority has been given to them.

But still, what I was alluding to was that while governments can alienate rights by force, them doing so is exceeding their authority and resisting their rule is not rebellion in that context. Even if the people voted to alienate such basic rights, the government still does not have legitimate authority. My goal was to take away legitimacy from such governments and their rule.

I stated this in a sibling comment as well but this is the reason by which american revolution (July 4th coming up!) was justified. The english rule under king george used force to restrict and regulate inalienable rights and thus lost it's legitimacy. Without legitimacy, it was possible to organize resistance and revolt against such rule.

> No one has any rights unless someone with guns is willing to enforce those rights

Right? Be in the state of nature. Argue with that lion you have a right to not be eaten. I don't think she will listen.

Funny how you describe the basic need as "the right to buy", what about those without enough resources to buy on their own such?

Then you get into positive vs negative rights. We’re very much a negative rights society and you can’t square the two. Negative rights feel good because they don’t infringe on anyone else, whereas a positive right always does. Your positive right is someone else’s lack of a negative right, the opposite isn’t true.

For someone to have a positive right to shelter, for instance, you have to take shelter from someone (or, as we typically do, money from someone to pay for it). Taxation is the one way we’ve managed to get people to at least someone accept positive rights here, but if you ask anyone under 30 who is a Republican why they are, they’ll almost always cite positive rights like welfare. It’s so uncomfortable feeling to us that it becomes the basis of our political philosophy frequently.

It’s never felt comfortable to me to call things like that a right. Public health care is the only sane option, IMO, and we should do it, but calling it a “right“ always feels wrong to me and I think most Americans agree because we’re so strongly in the negative rights camp.

> Negative rights feel good because they don’t infringe on anyone else, whereas a positive right always does.

The lack of positive rights infringes on a society’s own fabric, however. The right to a lawyer or legal counsel is a positive right born from the ideal of fairness under the law; I’m not sure framing the American (conservative?) character as so staunchly against positive rights is correct. Police protection is very popular with the right, and that necessarily involves the labour of others.

Society ensuring some minimum standard of health so that one may properly navigate life (and enjoy the rest of their rights) is framed as a right as health is a general precursor to everything else: it’s not that odd a framing, no? “You have the right to vote, but not to live long enough to get to the polls” is the outcome of categorizing essential societal functions as somehow out of scope of what society should do. I think the average Republican gets that, though a lower tax bill is always the priority.

> The right to a lawyer or legal counsel is a positive right born from the ideal of fairness under the law; I’m not sure framing the American (conservative?) character as so staunchly against positive rights is correct.

This is a negative right: the state cannot prosecute you without a lawyer on your side.

> Police protection is very popular with the right, and that necessarily involves the labour of others.

Police protection is not a right. The police will come and investigate and follow up, maybe, but you can't assume they'll protect you. They might be far away and unable to do so.

You have the right to live as long as you want to, you just don’t have the right to make me pay for it. Those are two very different things, both ethically and practically. (I am, as I said, pro public health care anyway.)

You are correct that police and attorneys for the indigent are a couple positive rights. I didn’t mean we don’t have any. We just don’t have a culture of them.

Put another way, something that didn’t even exist 100 yrs ago can’t be framed as a right. Saying I have a right to an iPhone is the same as saying I have a right to health insurance.

The right to a gadget and the right to health are incomparable on a number of levels. Even besides that, women’s suffrage is less than a century old in most places, and just about in the rest. Gay rights are even younger. Health, women and gays have all existed since the dawn of time; the “when” in codifying rights has never really correlated with historical prevalence, only societal development.

In the US, the police have NO legal obligation to help or protect you.

"Rights to healthcare" ultimately means "rights to enslave healthcare workers". If healthcare workers refuse to serve you, you have no healthcare unless you force them to serve you which makes them your slave.

Positive rights always end up in some form of forced labor aka slavery.

The lawyer question is different. The government is given the right to enforce laws, but the responsibility to provide legal council to counterweight the force of government. Lawyers aren't compelled to be public defenders, but if no public defender were available/willing, the government would not be allowed to imprison and try someone, so it is a negative right.

The comparison to slavery is rather distasteful. Both by recognizing actual slavery and by the simple reality of public service being a profession, not a sentence. Your right to health compels tax resources to be spent caring for you, not enslaving people into free cardiology.

The practice of healthcare already comes with the understanding that all who seek treatment (resources permitting) will be treated, and the interrelationship between patient, hospital, doctor, and the duty to care is foundational to the right to healthcare. It is however not the point. EMTALA in the US could be further reading if you’re interested in how refusal of care works in practice re: funding.

As per law, in the hypothetical where no lawyer could be found to take the case and no public defendant compelled to, the situation merely continues with rights violation, instead with a delayed trial or excess imprisonment. Like all rights in general, the loss of one weighs on the rest as if a ball on a net.

Well, technically you can do those things without ID. People do. There are people who survive without it. We have millions of undocumented immigrants who simply can’t have IDs but they get by. I really don’t know how. They’re breaking laws doing it and we lack the political will to do anything about it. (And also our economy would crumble if we somehow stopped it entirely, we are highly dependent on them.)

But man, good luck. It’s really hard to economically participate in modern society without it. Most of our country is really hard to get around in without a car. Your job opportunities are really limited without a social security number. Etc.

Whether right or wrong, we functionally have national ID and my point really was that lack of something specifically called that isn’t going to save us from the barbarians at the gate.

>A person's right to exist and to pursue continued existence is inalienable and beyond the authority of a government or society to regulate.

No it is not. All rights are created by the state and enforced by it.

A lot of them have proven this. Including the one this article is about. Everything is alienable.

Rights are one thing, their protection is another. Most rights are granted by the state, some rights though are beyond the state's authority to grant. This belief and concept is the literal founding cornerstone of america as a nation.

The rebellion against english rule was justified because the state exceeded it's authority to regulate rights by restricting inalienable rights.

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