In a day and age where our government overarches so many different aspects of our everyday lives, it is easy for us to fall under the belief that our rights are those granted to us by our civil governments, rather than those we inherently possess, granted to us by some other sovereign entity. Many today treat the state as the sovereign authority; we often look to documents such as the Constitution–particularly the Bill of Rights–as the source of our rights. While there is a hint of truth to this, we are looking at it in the wrong way.

The truth of the matter is that the rights that we seemingly gain from our laws are actually rights that we as mankind possess inherently. The sole purposes of the government should be to protect these existing rights and to defend against that which threatens the free and safe expression of these liberties. This was the primary objective of the Bill of Rights. True freedom includes the inherent right of mankind to property ownership. This ties directly into a free market economy, in which people have the right to freely produce and exchange goods and services and consume according to the fruits of their labor.

The role of government is not to restrict the rights of its people, but rather to protect its citizens’ God-given rights. Today, we are accustomed to constant trampling of our liberties by the very entities that are designated to uphold and defend them. In socialist circles of thought, in which the idea of a powerful government, supposedly for the benefit of the people, is praised, what is truly being promoted is the loss of rights that the state never was the source of to begin with. The state is not sovereign; human rights of life, liberty, and property are God-given and are not to be interfered with by legislators. Limited government promotes the idea of a government whose sole purpose is to protect the fundamental human rights and safety of its people.🔹