[foobarbazqux]

Yeah, it often seems they're a disguise for moral absolutism. Some convenient rule system that you can latch on to and then use to decide if things are good or bad. Tax is the worst thing there is, for example.

But, natural rights are in the same category as human rights, and there are many human rights that I value despite their nonexistence as laws.

It seems to me that natural rights are often a covert argument for male supremacy over women and children. A man is stronger than a woman, therefore he has a natural right to dominate her. The same goes for children. A child has no right to anything from its parents, because if you must depend on someone else, you wouldn't be free to obtain it in the absence of other people.

But dependence is how we are born into the world. Education is given to us while we are in a state of dependence. Is it really only that educators have the right to educate? Perhaps, if you really don't believe in assigning rights on the basis of need.

In the libertarian mindset, it's almost as if the government represents one's parents, and the romanticized state of being alone in the wild represents freedom from one's parents. Actually I believe that it's next to impossible for anybody arguing for an extreme position like anarcho-capitalism in the typical cult-like manner that we see to be reasonable, because doing so would require making the connection from what they're proselytizing to their own lives and processing their own feelings about authority.