... our recent history has seen the death of classical liberalism, which is the death of the identity and freedom of the individual, and with the death of the individual it is, of course, the death of arts, the death of culture, the death of all that gives value to a human life. It's the death of hope and everything good. The pursuit of happiness ends, again, in the Gulag, albeit this time around, a Gulag of Good Intentions. And there’s no way back to a state of freedom, for against this collectivist menace of state forced altruism, the individual is powerless: that was precisely why the individual, the smallest minority in a society, was the one who needed the protection of the law, and from the tyranny of the mob. We have had voted the opposite.
“The historian Keith Baker has argued that Comte and Saint-Simon were primarily concerned with bringing an end to the era of the French Revolution. Like Sieyès and Condorcet before them, Comte and Saint-Simon believed it was up to a class of experts—scientists, industrialists—to work out a new doctrine capable of bringing enduring social and political stability. The scientists would turn their observational skills onto the social and political realm, revealing its laws of development. The industrialists would then reconstruct institutions in such a way that their operations were in harmony with these laws. Unlike Sieyès and Condorcet, however, these postrevolutionary thinkers adopted what Baker has called a “theocratic” understanding of knowledge. Any deviation from rationality became a kind of heresy. “No one is so insane as to set himself up, knowingly, in revolt against the nature of things,” Comte argued (101). He had supreme faith in the power of knowledge.
The objective was to protect against arbitrariness in all of its manifestation. Earlier political thinkers had tended to associate arbitrariness mainly with absolutist governments, but for Comte any form of government was susceptible so long as it rested on “metaphysical” rather than “positive” principles. It hardly mattered whether the supreme legislator owed its existence to one contract or two, whether it was composed of one man or many. It could even exist in the sort of state envisioned by Rousseau in The Social Contract…”
We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness – The Declaration of Independence
Things of human origin (whether physical or psychological) may be designated as “man-made facts”—as distinguished from the metaphysically given facts. A skyscraper is a man-made fact, a mountain is a metaphysically given fact. One can alter a skyscraper or blow it up (just as one can alter or blow up a mountain), but so long as it exists, one cannot pretend that it is not there or that it is not what it is..
The concept of a “right” pertains only to action—specifically, to freedom of action. It means freedom from physical compulsion, coercion or interference by other men.
Thus, for every individual, a right is the moral sanction of a positive—of his freedom to act on his own judgment, for his own goals, by his own voluntary, uncoerced choice. As to his neighbors, his rights impose no obligations on them except of a negative kind: to abstain from violating his rights.
The right to life is the source of all rights—and the right to property is their only implementation. Without property rights, no other rights are possible. Since man has to sustain his life by his own effort, the man who has no right to the product of his effort has no means to sustain his life. The man who produces while others dispose of his product, is a slave.
Since Man has inalienable individual rights, this means that the same rights are held, individually, by every man, by all men, at all times. Therefore, the rights of one man cannot and must not violate the rights of another.
It is not society, nor any social right, that forbids you to kill—but the inalienable individual right of another man to live.