Hacker News Reader

Comment by gkya | Hacker News Reader

> As an American, reading the term rights associated with increased government control is nonsensical.

This is nonsensical. You can not have rights w/o government anyways. You may have privileges or power to force others to comply, but "rights" are defined by a third party entity that enforce them.

View on HN

You have those backward. Natural rights, at least, are considered to exist before and outside of government. Enumerated rights may derive from government, as do privileges. The "lege" in privilege literally means "law".

Enumerated rights are the rights the GP was talking about. These are defined in law, though may derive from natural rights.

Yeah, good luck enforcing that natural rights w/o any entity to protect you from those who are stronger than you and keen on violating your "rights" for their own good. If I have a gun and you don't, and nobody can enforce your right to life, the chances are that I can kill you and your right to life with a single movement of a finger any time I want. And because not everybody can become warlords, w/o any organisation to enforce those natural rights, they'll only belong to those with more guns. And such organisation, in one form or another, is some sort of government. Calling some rights "natural rights" and believing that they "exist before and outside of government" are just naivety in the least, if you don't have nobody to make sure nobody violates them. We don't live in philosophical wonderlands, unfortunately. In our lands some A. Nix guy can easily acquire data of 50million people in a country and put that to use of unlawful, evil organisations. And just like everybody will kill everybody if you don't have jails to put killers in, these companies will continue on forming and exploiting until there are grave consequences to doing so.

I'm just clearing up some confusion about definitions here, not making any comment on enforcing rights.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com