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You cannot have a right to rebel against that which grants the rights. If the government is what grants rights, then there is no problem with any rights violation as long as they declare you don't have that right.

But we tend to agree that rights are not granted by the government, and while we may not agree what does grant it, the right to rebel against that which does not grant rights does still exist.

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The key point of the 10th amendment of the US constitution [0] is that the people already _have_ the rights, and do not need to have them "granted" - rather, the rights of the national state are limited. The constitution grants powers to the government and individual states, and the remaining powers and rights are already the people's.

> The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

This is in contrast to many prior systems of government, where the privileges available to a populace were whatever the monarch decided they could do, or which they had extracted as concessions from the monarchs via agreements like the Magna Carta.

0: http://constitutioncenter.org/interactive-constitution/amend...

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