Human Rights

We commonly run across memes like the one here, whose point is that government and other people owe us nothing.

I know there are people who believe that, but I don’t think they’re very smart.

When human beings formed organized societies about 10,000 years ago, they wisely decided to make and enforce rules that restricted behavior.  That’s because it was obvious that, left unchecked, people would enslave, torture, murder, steal from one another, etc.

From the United Nations:  The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) is a milestone document in the history of human rights. Drafted by representatives with different legal and cultural backgrounds from all regions of the world, the Declaration was proclaimed by the United Nations General Assembly in Paris on 10 December 1948 (General Assembly resolution 217 A) as a common standard of achievements for all peoples and all nations. It sets out, for the first time, fundamental human rights to be universally protected and it has been translated into over 500 languages. The UDHR is widely recognized as having inspired, and paved the way for, the adoption of more than seventy human rights treaties, applied today on a permanent basis at global and regional levels (all containing references to it in their preambles). 

There are millions of Americans who believe that all this is for sissies, and want to abolish institutions like the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. After all, don’t we have a God-given right to own hand grenades?

The bill linked above was introduced to the U.S. Congress by Marjorie Taylor Greene, but it’s cosponsored by several other Republicans.