Human Rights

So, I was sitting in class when one of my co-teachers walks in and asks if her students can use the classroom. I was supposed to be doing lesson planning. So, I really didn't need the classroom. I continued to work on my lessons while students wrote about Human Rights. What about Human Rights? Anything. Most of them drew pictures (I mean comics) on their papers. One or two of the forty students in the room actually wrote an essay about Human Rights.

For forty of the forty-five minutes of class, I kept doing my lesson plans. For the last five, I decided to write my own declaration of human rights. Why? Because...

Anyways, this is what I wrote...

Human Rights

Student Name and Number: 강동원--160116

To discuss any topic of human rights, I feel it is necessary
to start with the basic tenets of my philosophy.

First, a person owns his or her own body. If we did not then the concept of human
rights, itself, is negated.

Second, a person owns the product of his or her own
work. If we did not then the concept of
ownership and, thus, the right to own the food or water we eat or drink would
be negated.

The best philosophical statements that I have found that
does not harm the first two principles is this: “everyone has the right to do
whatever they want”. In any given
situation, one must ask themselves if everyone in the given situation has done
something that they didn’t want to. If
not, then no rights have been violated.
If so, then rights have been violated.

Murder is wrong because it violates the concept of human
rights, itself.

Theft is wrong because it violates the second tenet of my
philosophy.

Theft is just the taking of something that someone did not
want to give.

However, if theft is wrong, what is taxation?

Surely, there are people who do not want to give money to
the government for some or all of the services that government presumes to
offer.

Is this not theft?

Is government somehow different because it is made of many
people? I would say no.

If a group of people doing something could make an action
correct, would not gang murder be permissible?

To me, the size or title of the person or people who do an
action makes no difference as to the justice of the action.

The only question as to the justice of a situation is
whether or not the people involved in the situation did anything that was
against their own volition.

Now, while I think that this is a good statement on Human Rights, I have to ask myself...

How dare I become involved in the forced detention of human beings for 7 hours a day?

--Matt W.

Note: Ayn Rand, Murray Rothbard, and Walter Block have helped create this statement far more than my own mind. I just put it in my own words.