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>The Bill of Rights says the Government "can't restrict your freedom of speech", not that you have the right to free speech. There's a difference. So you already have freedom of speech.

That's very idealistic, and I'm glad I live in a country where this fiction is enshrined at such a base level.

In reality, we are born, human creatures, unto a world with billions and billions of other human creatures. The only rights we really have on this Earth are the ones the other creatures around us let us have. If preserving the fiction that we aren't collectively (or often individually) the sole arbiters of the rights of others means increased liberty to some degree, I'll take that.

But yeah, semantically you're spot on. The Bill of Rights clearly concedes the authority to a higher power than the government.

> The only rights we really have on this Earth are the ones the other creatures around us let us have.

If you take this position, what's the use of defining a concept of "rights" at all? The very notion is meant to describe something retained by individuals irrespective of their relations with others, as a means of establishing consistent boundaries within which we undertake those very relations.

If you're going to locate the origin of rights within the context of those social relations, how could you distinguish a violation of one's rights from merely not having those rights in the first place? What purpose could the notion serve here?

>If you take this position, what's the use of defining a concept of "rights" at all?

It's not a position to take as much as a description of reality.

I think you're confusing my observation of the reality we live in with some sort of endorsement (which does not exist).

I thought I was pretty clear that my position is that I am glad we have enshrined a belief system that cites the premise that we have certain inalienable rights. In our case, this ideal is adopted, and our claim to those rights are enshrined into law.

>The very notion is meant to describe something retained by individuals irrespective of their relations with others, as a means of establishing consistent boundaries within which we undertake those very relations.

As I said, I believe rights do exist. I simply am aware of the fact that we, as people, grant them to ourselves and others. Rights being granted by a higher power or some outside authority...that is an illusion, and just one belief system among many of one group of people granting the rights (among many groups).

Edit: But really, the simplest way to illustrate my point is that if you tell me you have inalienable rights, and I smirk and say "says who?", what will you answer? Just because we wish to have intrinsic protections in our existence doesn't mean we do.

> It's not a position to take as much as a description of reality.

A purely empirical description of reality would, of course, regard the notion of "rights", "government", and "society" as mere abstractions that have no autonomous existence, and are merely ideas in the minds of human beings.

An explication of this empirical understanding would recognize that human beings use abstract ideas to mediate their experience of the world, and that the value of ideas is to be found in the utility they provide to those who bear them.

So, accepting the reality that we live in is one filled with human beings who mediate their experience of life - and their relationships with each other - via conscious ideas, the discussion turns to evaluating the utility of those ideas; there's no other "reality" to explore.

>A purely empirical description of reality would, of course, regard the notion of "rights", "government", and "society" as mere abstractions that have no autonomous existence,

This is completely consistent with what I've been saying. The fiction of a set of inalienable rights granted to us by an omnipotent power is a fiction, or 'abstraction' if you will.

Couldn't agree more with this post.

Indeed, whether you regard that "omnipotent power" as being some ineffable divinity or some leviathan called "the state".

But we can indeed explore the empirical existence of the ideas that human beings employ in their undertaking of life, and make useful distinctions between those which have their origin in the nature of the individual prior to his social relations, and those which are a product of the social relations themselves.

>Indeed, whether you regard that "omnipotent power" as being some ineffable divinity or some leviathan called "the state".

Personally, I regard them as one in the same. The State is just a proxy of the will of the community one finds himself in, and Divinity just a proxy of man's will subscribed to and enforced by other men of belief.

Neither are omnipotent, but rather omnipresent as long as one finds himself surrounded by other people, and while they are not omnipotent, they are plenty powerful, -especially compared to a lone individual in most cases.

But, ultimately, everyone is a lone individual, and the "will of the community", to the extent that there even is a consistently identifiable thing, is the product of a complex of protocols and values that were already available to each individual in his own right.

Communities don't bootstrap themselves - they evolve out of the willing participation of individuals, and when the meditative mechanisms of that community fall to the manipulation of one faction or another, communities can and do break apart.

Taking the existence of a stable social framework for granted is very dangerous, and the concept of "rights" is one of the tools we employ precisely to protect that social framework's substantive foundation.

And the Government is not allowed to restrict it with any new law. The US Constitution was not made to give you rights, but to restrict the Government from taking them

This is called 'positive rights' and 'negative rights'. Negative rights are your rights and the government is not allowed to restrict them, they prevent the government from doing a thing. Positive rights are where the government is required to act to ensure you actually have the right to something. (e.g. the right to a fair and speedy trial requires the government to set up a courts system that is able to handle the load, they can't just have 1 court for the whole country that has a waiting list of 100 years, some places have "a right to education" which requires the state to set up and fund schools).

Some constitutions & binding declarations of rights have positive and negative rights. E.g. Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union has been interpreted to include positive rights. I have no idea of the US situation.

It would be interesting if 'Freedom of speech' was a positive right. What would happen then...

(more details http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_and_positive_rights )

> I have no idea of the US situation.

Well there's the speedy trial thing. There's also the right to an attorney which turned from a negative right into a positive right.

That's still a negative right, if you interpret it as "the government cannot put you in jail unless it makes sure you have legal representation."

So the government isn't actually required to give you a lawyer; it just can't put you in jail if it doesn't.

That's arguing over words. Fact is that the government is required to spend money or your rights have been broken.

It's not arguing over words; it's arguing over the concepts which the words represent.

Two distinct ideas appear to have been confounded together under the mantle of "rights" here, and we can't find fault in those seeking to clean up the confusion.

We can, however, find fault with those who seek to intentionally prevaricate in order to artificially apply the connotations earned by one idea to the other, and this includes those governments that try to define goods which must be acquired within society as being within the category of "rights".

Well what do you mean, that's a perfectly legitimate retort to the notion that the right to an attorney is a positive right. You might as well call the right to a trial as a positive right if you're going to call the right to a free attorney a positive right.

The concept of "positive rights" really doesn't make any sense - the purpose of defining rights is to delineate the boundaries of the power of others with respect to the individual; i.e. what the individual retains by virtue of being an individual, and isn't required to sacrifice as a condition of entering into a social context. So how can you designate goods that are acquired within that social context to be "rights"?

Mandates that a particular institution must do one thing or another are outside the scope of the theory of rights - this is just policy, which, in a just and healthy political system, is restrained from transgressing against the rights of individuals, but is by definition incapable of altering the nature of those rights.

The concept of "positive rights" really doesn't make any sense

Eppur si muove (Italian for 'and yet it moves', fabled as what Galileo said when signing his confession that the sun goes around the sun). Some jurisiticions recognise positive rights. Ergo they exist.

outside the scope of the theory of rights - this is just policy

Again, some jurisiticions recognise these as not a mere policy, but as rights of a person.

Some people may recognize the existence of 'flying bananas': yellow objects which propel themselves through the air by their own power.

This is, of course, due to imprecision in those people's use of symbolic identifiers: those who possess a higher-resolution semantic repertoire might instead call the thing being observed a 'canary', and regard it has having little ontological connection to a banana.

Thank you for this post. I'm constantly amazed, dumbfounded, and outraged that people don't know the BASICS OF REAL FREEDOM in this country.

It's not what the government allows you to do.

It's what we allow and not allow the government to do.

in principle, yes. In fact, that's not how things really work...