In the past months, a major discussion has begun over the rights of government. With major contingencies on both foreign and economic fronts, government officials and average people are beginning to speculate whether or not our government has gone far from its purpose. What are the legitimate functions of government? From whom does it receive the right to perform those functions?
John Locke, an eminent philosopher of the 18th century, developed the concept of social contract. This social contract was not a literal meeting of two parties; Locke perceived the social contract as an ideological manifestation of what existed between governments and their citizens. Locke argued that governments were a contractual agreement between the people and their leaders. This unspoken agreement establishes that, as long as the government rules justly, the people will obey the government, and as long as the people obey the laws and act peaceably, the government will not use force against them. This concept also implies that any governmental right is entrusted by its citizens pending its proper use of them.
If these rights are entrusted by the citizens, then the citizens must have had these rights before the social contract. These rights can only have so many potential origins. An individualist would claim they came from oneself, but if they come from oneself, there must have been some time in which man formulated his own rights, which would pre-suppose the right to formulate one's own ideas. A collectivist would say that individual rights come from the society in which he finds himself; from whom does society receive its rights?
A group can only be formed of individuals, thus any rights of the group must be derived from those of its membership. As a Christian, I believe that rights are derived from God (because God assumes the role of prime mover). These rights are given to man in order to fulfill His purpose for our lives; without these rights we would be what C. S. Lewis refers to as automatons, because free will and personal rights are co-dependent.
Since we have established that rights are derived from God, we know that these rights must be in agreement with God's principles. A list of rights and assumed rights being daunting, I will address a few categories of rights: restrictive rights, active rights and expressive rights.
Restrictive rights are those which empower an individual to prevent or impeded the process of an action. This type of right may only be employed when the action to be prevented is in direct opposition to one's wellbeing or exercise of rights; these rights may be thought of as reactive rights.
Active rights is the most encompassing group, including the rights to: life, ownership, pursuit of values and movement. These rights allow man to exist in the world as an active agent, empowering him to obey or rebel against his maker, giving his love or hate of God substantial value.
Expressive rights, which may be considered an active right, are those rights which empower man to display and communicate his innermost feelings. Without these rights, man cannot employ his other rights.
In order for a government to have a right, its citizens must have previously had that right and been unable to execute those rights in a way that is pleasing to God. In other words, man must concede the right to use physical force on one another as a restrictive right must be conceded to the government in order to prevent the vendetta feuds all too common in eastern European countries.
If a government wishes to restrict the use of a drug in order to keep its citizens safe, it must find a valid right that its citizens previously owned to do so. If a government wishes to go to war, it must validate that the opposing nation initiated violence against it, as the right to violence is only justifiable in prevention of or reaction to any unprovoked violence. Using this simple formula we can find the answer to any question of governmental policy.
However, this is not to say that citizens do or ought to delegate all their rights to their government. For example, obviously, one cannot and should not delegate his right to life to his government (death camps), nor should he delegate his right of expression (government sponsored propaganda). What then can we use as criteria for the delegation of rights by the individual to his government?
We must return to the social contract. Why did this curious compact come to be between rulers and citizens? Collective safety. It is a generally accepted maxim that there is safety in numbers. For this reason the right to use force against an aggressor (a restrictive right) was delegated to government. These aggressors were quickly realized to be both foreign and domestic; this being the case, citizens delegated the right to punish its own people in order to prevent aggression and fraud (a form of violence to ones rights to ownership).
With this increased responsibility people then delegated the right to fund these actions to their government through a self determined tax system. In each case of these fundamental delegations, we see a need to prevent any restriction of one of the citizen's rights by fraud or violence. I propose that this should be the criteria for any and all governmental actions.
In order for any government to be deemed legitimate, it must be exclusively devoted to protecting its citizens' rights through the exercise of the rights delegated to it, and nothing more. Any further government action is either a well intentioned but obviously flawed plan by an irrational reformer, or the sadistic attempts by a surreptitious government out of control.