Originally posted by normbenign"Natural Rights" are just a fancy way of saying "some stuff I like."
Sure, and most of them were deists also, but that doesn't mean atheists can't have opinions in the US, nor does it mean that natural rights exist.
Natural rights only become actual rights when a government entity chooses to enforce them, as by adopting the US Constitution.
Originally posted by no1marauderYes, I'm aware of that, but the individual and/or group don't cease to exist because of incorporation.
An individual is an individual and the corporation he forms is a separate and distinct legal entity. They are not the same thing.
Yes, they are different, but they are also the same.
Originally posted by no1marauderIt's interesting that you label me a "Euro style socialist" even though I have never voted for a socialist party.
Laissez faire anarchists and Euro style socialists both disparage the idea of Natural Rights for different ideological reasons. Neither were very well represented among the Founders or at the Constitutional Convention.
Originally posted by no1marauderSee the tenth amendment. .....the States and the people.
Only the State law even allows the creation of a corporation so your claim is nonsense. Even without a statute an individual exists; he is not dependent for his existence on positive law as an artificial entity like a corporation is.
Originally posted by no1marauderWhile I generally think that most of them had some notion of natural rights, I don't think it is well articulated in anything but in the first paragraph of the DOI. Do you find the phrase liberally sprinkled into the Constitutional debates?
There is no way of knowing what the Founders believed as regards Natural Rights?
What an astonishing assertion!
More to the point, unless a government enumerated human rights, it is pretty easy to see that those rights hardly existed in reality. They were seldom even mentioned before the enlightenment.
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Originally posted by no1marauderSee the edit. They typo made the sentence incomprehensible.
Is that supposed to be a response to my point?
By the way the strongest argument against unlimited government power is the existence of a significant list of enumerated powers, and that many things are not enumerated. The logical conclusion is that those things not enumerated are left to the States and to the people.