Government 1A Week 13 Human Rights

Prompt: “Is the state the source of human rights?”

This question has to do both with politics and economy, as well as ethics and personal belief. Asking about the “source” of human rights makes it seem like they’re asking for the origin, and to most people that origin would be God. If this is true then it would mean God gifted us with the power of philosophy, and from that philosophy sprang the ideas of unalienable human rights. So the source of human rights would therefore be the people.

But if you’re looking at the question from an economical point of view than it all has to do with the political system each individual is living under. Depending on how far the state steps into ones life it can greatly influence the amount of rights someone is aloud to practice. For example socialism takes away the right of owning and developing personal property for ones own benefit. That property then falls under jurisdiction of the state, and the state attempts to make up for this with free healthcare, free college etc. So the rights are revoked and replaced with free luxuries, though I didn’t mention how expensive these “free” luxurious actually are when you take tax into consideration.

In conclusion the source of our human rights shouldn’t be the center of the question. Whether you’re religious or not most everyone can agree that human rights grew from the philosophy of intelligent individuals, whether or not that seed was planted by God is another debate all together. What should be the center of the question is how much does the state meddle with our already existing rights. The state shouldn’t be viewed as the flowing source of human rights, but rather the vacuum that sucks away those rights. This isn’t always bad, the right to murder is certainly a good right to suck away from the general public. But the state exists to govern, not to give. We the people created our unalienable human rights, or at the very least our ancestors did. Those philosophers of the past should be credited as the source of human rights, the state only works with, governs, and sucks away those rights whenever they see fit.