The day anyone starts calling life a civil right is the day we need to have a true revolution and drown that noxious idea in blood! Life is a natural right, and like property, is inherent and NOT granted by society. The notion that it IS granted by society or a government leads inevitably to the notion that either can take it away at will.

And what does that entail? That is sheer nonsense. What else does recognition consist of, aside from acknowledging their rights?

Empty moral posturing, stating nothing more than your personal preferences, and no more germane than quoting Bible verses. Except Bible verses actually have some authority and recognized influence, as opposed to your delusions that people want to quote you.

They DO! It is simply not a case of them being property. Life & liberty are equal natural rights to property.

It WAS illegal, and it WAS wrong. Slavery and warfare are two evils that do not justify each other. Going to war to end slavery was not a valid reason for the Civil War, it was a romantic excuse to induce people to fight it. Eradicating state sovereignty is not nearly so appealing a battle cry.

And it has nothing to do with the war! Read some history beyond grade school pap. The given reason was ending "rebellion" and the legal justification was the mythical indissolubility of the Union. As it was, the government attempted to amend the Constitution to prevent any abolition laws, in an attempt to placate the slave states. Ironically, THAT was almost the thirteenth amendment. But such an amendment would be just as wrong as federal abolition laws, as it is interfering with the prerogatives of the states. Since laws about slavery are not one of the enumerated powers of the federal government, they WERE the rights of the states.

If he's alone, who is to gainsay his claim? It IS so. He does own the land. Enforcing that claim if another were to come around might be an issue, but the same goes for life or liberty.

Well those would be civil rights, dumbass. They are not natural rights.

And the supposed benefit of society is the protection of natural rights, not the ability to freeload off the more productive.

I disagree.

Society functions just fine without providing food, education and the like. Society only allows people to seek those things on their own.

Once again, you reduce it to your personal preference! YOU reject the argument and that is all there is to it, while ironically decrying the right of people to do this with their own lives and property! And you are offering a false argument, claiming that the only possible choices are a welfare state or living in the wild.
IT WAS MY OWN THOUGHT. Hey, why don't YOU provide proof those were your words, anyway?

It is not a quotation, mis- or otherwise. If you even did say that, it is a coincidental combination of words. Why don't you post a list of your trademark phrases so everyone knows not to claim them? Unlike you, I DO have a phrase that I did not even know was mine, but people attribute it to me anyway, "Cannoli's PoV trap." I certainly don't go around in a snit when people make a reference to that concept, whether or not they attribute it to me, even if they DO seem to think it is mine.

Expand your circles beyond your self-congratulatory socialist blogs. Classical liberals and their contemporary admirers and students routinely reference the notion as a given that what the government grants the government can take away.

Chesteron was the actual phrase in quotation marks, and everything else was pure me.

But true. Is your assertion that you are the inventor of a phrasing any less so? I still don't even know what your words are that I supposedly "quoted." In addition, if I WAS using your quote, I would have been mocking the idea, since, as you point out, it is different in meaning. If I was mocking it, I would have either had to assume the idea was so widespread as to be in the public domain, and thus no citation was needed or I would have had to specify who it was in order to mock him properly, otherwise there would be no point. In any event, you are not significant enough to cite as an authority OR mock.

I assumed it was more recognizable.

Did you forget the part about fallen beings one sentence later? The failure of people to respect someone's inherent rights to life, liberty and property does not invalidate the rights. That is what makes them "natural" - they do not require a human authority to authorize them, and a society which does not recognize them is immoral and unjust.


Let's get the semantics out of the way then. Natural rights are those rights all human beings are endowed with in regards to each other, by virtue of their being human beings. They apply only to human conduct towards one another, but are inherent and sacrosanct. They are best summed up as "Life, liberty and property," though there are other rights and practices which extend from them, and they are often expanded upon.
Civil rights are those rights in a society which are granted by society, and protected under law.

You appear to be working under an expanded and invented definition of civil rights. In your parlance, I would not recognize any civil rights beyond the first generation.

I agree, MORALLY speaking. However, as a government principle, it is trickier ground. The GOVERNMENT recognized property rights of slaveowners before and throughout the Civil War (in fact, shortly after the war, the only slave in the South belonged to Ulysses S Grant, since once the Confederacy had surrendered, the Emancipation Proclamation was de facto law, and all the slaves, even those still in practical bondage were now freed by it. However, when Mrs. Grant came to join her husband in the South, she brought her own slave, who was not freed under that noxious document), and their attempts to interfere with what THEY recognized as private property demonstrated a dangerous disregard for a crucial right and freedom. After all, if today they can decide that they have the power to strip property rights that are legally acknowledged, tomorrow they can apply the same precedent to some other, more morally grounded property rights. Fallen beings, remember - the property owners were liable to paranoid fears and the government officials were liable to abuse power.

Correct. In addition, they have used the fallacious argument that there was no other way to end slavery as a justification, in an effort to subvert people's moral principles to gain their support for an act of barbaric tyranny. Is the elevation of a million people from slavery to poverty morally equivalent to killing half a million? I find the moral assertions of people's right to certain goods and services to be much in the same vein.

Name one genuine civil right that has nothing to do with life, liberty or property. Even those amendments dealing with states rights and rights reserved to the people spring from the natural right to liberty.

Sure, in theory. In practice, the lack of property rights strips people of the means to oppose the government and protect their rights. While PACs and corporate donors have made "campaign contributions" a dirty phrase, the fact is, running for office requires money, which is property. Without the right of people to spend money as they please, how can they participate in the democractic process? Without the ability to choose what to buy and how much to spend, how can market forces ever produce goods. People ARE fallen beings, and ARE motivated by greed and self interest. Including the people in government. As long as "the" people have their rights to own and dispose of their property as they wish protected, corporations and service providers will be forced to kowtow to the will of the people. The surest form of power is money, and the best way to bring power to the people is by allowing them to have the most money they can get or keep.

It's an argument on an internet site whose number of active users seldom hits three figures, not a dissertion or graduate thesis.