Originally posted by Stoic
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Rights are enforced by the police and the courts. And they are enumerated in government documents.
If any group of us believed that we had other rights, it wouldn't be very meaningful until those rights were recognized by a government authority (courts or legislation).
There's the meta-question, of course, of what rights governments should grant, and why. But I think it's worth reminding the libertarian crowd that governments are the ones who in practice decide what the list of rights are and uphold them. In that sense governments are the creators and providers of freedom.
And for those who would argue that the list of what rights governments should grant is religious in origin, I would point out that there is nothing in the Bible that resembles any list of rights even vaguely corresponding to modern lists of human rights. Good luck finding in the bible the right to a free press, or the right to own a gun, never mind the 10 pages of human rights in the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights. And good luck trying to determine from the bible if the right to an education or the right to healthcare should be rights or not.
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