ACLU's Most Recent Statement on No Fly No Buy Lists.

[Igel]

40. Sorry, but that's the wave of the future.

To put rights as the foundation of a free and civil society requires understanding. We don't test understanding, we test facts. Rights are what the government says you have--and, in any event, are not a natural kind of thing by virtue of being human but something that's necessary to achieve social justice as defined yesterday by somebody who says something you agree with for the present.

I love the idea of govenment-provided services as rights. Where, exactly, the funding and the staffing comes from if nobody steps up is a question. Presumably my right to food pre-empts a farmer's right to abstain from growing food. Russian proletariats had a right to food and healthcare. Farmers and doctors who didn't play along were enemies of the state. It's a question of who's going to oppress whom--the person who simply does nothing to satisfy another person's rights or the person who claims a right and demands that the serfs comply.

However, first and foremost we have to have a society. We don't. We have a bunch of antagonistic, warring, resentful mini-societies all saying they matter--and if you try to say that "everybody matters," then it's a problem. Society's being ripped apart, and the result of that is either a dictatorship or a kind of government where everybody really is subservient to the bureaucracy, which is to say, a benevolent dictatorship and groups fight not for the future but for immediate power.

Somehow, culture failed to be passed to the next generation.