Re:Chelsea Manning is tweeting from prison
by mason240 on Thursday April 09, 2015 @02:36PM
(#9349884)
The only reason contortions are involved is because you are inserting them to make the issue seem more complicated than it is.
>People have a human right to participate in their government, too.
Which is a limit on government's power. That is the essence of the entire Enlightenment philosophy that all this is based.
But the structures necessary to participate: someone's compelled to do something!
Start from nothing, and try to build up a system that at all resembles a democracy, and you're compelling people left and right. Throw in property rights, such as land ownership, and you're compelling people just about 24/7.
Just because you like being able to use the violence of the state to throw people off your lawn doesn't mean that it isn't compelling people to be in a certain place.
People have a human right to participate in their government, too. That certainly compels something to exist: a structure in which they can voice their desires in their governance.
It'd take a lot of contortions to work that right into being an ok-to-exist "negative right," and for my part just shows how "negative rights" breaks down really quickly once you get past the really easy stuff like speech.