[Zigurd]

That is your view. Now write a constitution based on that. Or, perhaps you find a constitution, or basic law, that has a viewpoint on rights to be superfluous.

The US constitution was written with a point of view: that people have rights, and that those rights are unenumerated. You might think that's rather artificial. But so is government, in general.

[rayiner]

The U.S. Constitution assumes that people have "rights" but does not articulate a theory of what those rights are. Do they exist in the state of nature, as Locke believed, or do they arise from recognition by society? The Constitution takes no position on that.

[AnimalMuppet]

The Declaration of Independence does take a position on that, however - that those rights are given by God, and therefore that no human has the authority to take them away.

[tptacek]

In the context of the thread, this sounds suspiciously like an argument that the US constitution was written without recognition of property rights. But of course nothing could be further from the truth.

[Zigurd]

Not at all. Property rights are not listed. Nor is the right to travel. Nor the right to use math to obscure there contents of a document, etc.etc. Yet these are all rights.

[tptacek]

Not only were the authors of the Constitution zealous believers in property rights, but many of them believed that property rights extended to the ownership of people.

This is a thread questioning the intrinsic merit of property rights, and I read your comment as suggesting that the Constitution might somehow refute property rights. It clearly does not.

[Zigurd]

Not all of them. And some who did, gave up on slavery.

Are they men? Then make them citizens and let them vote. Are they property? Why then is no other property included? The houses in [Philadelphia] are worth more than all the wretched slaves that cover the rice swamps of South Carolina....The admission of slaves into the representation when fairly explained comes to this: that the inhabitant of Georgia and South Carolina who goes to the coast of Africa and, in defiance of the most sacred laws of humanity, tears away his fellow creatures from their dearest connections and damns them to the most cruel bondages, shall have more votes in a government...