Last week, Virginia Senator Tim Kaine said he found it “extremely troubling” that a potential Trump nominee believed that people’s individual rights come from “their Creator,” and not from the government. 

This was in the context of a Senate hearing to consider the appointment of Riley Barnes, who has been nominated to serve as assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights, and labor. Barnes noted in his statement that he agreed with the idea “that all men are created equal because our rights come from God, our Creator; not from our laws, not from our governments.” 

In response to this, Kaine retorted:  ”The notion that rights don’t come from laws and don’t come from the government, but come from the Creator—that’s what the Iranian government believes. It’s a theocratic regime that bases its rule on Shi’a law and targets Sunnis, Bahá’ís, Jews, Christians and other religious minorities,” ...”They do it because they believe that they understand what natural rights are from their Creator. So the statement that our rights do not come from our laws or our governments is extremely troubling...” 

Kaine then claimed to be ”a strong believer in natural rights” although it is unclear how Kaine reconciles this claim with his apparent belief that that rights are not natural in any meaningful sense, but are an artifact of human legislation. Given this, it is clear Kaine’s version of natural rights can not be the same version of natural rights that serves as the foundation of the Declaration of Independence and as the foundation of the political views of most of the American revolutionaries—the political ideology we now call “classical liberalism.”

After all, the Declaration of Independence, authored by Thomas Jefferson and ratified by the Continental Congress in 1775, states plainly that human beings “are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Kaine’s statements tell us that, in his mind, this statement is indistinguishable from the ideology of Islamist theocrats and must be condemned. 

Jefferson didn’t invent this idea of natural rights, of course. The idea of natural rights—especially in the context of property rights—was already used extensively by John Locke and by Locke’s popularizes—especially the authors of Cato’s Letters, Trenchard and Gordon. It’s a safe bet that most of the American revolutionaries, like Jefferson, were familiar with these ideas and generally agreed with the idea that natural rights come from “the Creator”—or, at least, from some “natural” authority beyond the reach of the state. We could also note that the ideas go back further than Locke, who was himself influenced by writings on natural law by Richard Hooker. Hooker was himself influenced by Thomas Aquinas who developed the idea that there are eternal and natural laws which cannot be altered or abolished by the positive law of human lawmakers. 

Lew Rockwell sums all this up in his book The Left, the Right, and the State: 

The hallmark of Thomas Jefferson’s theory of politics—drawn from John Locke and the English liberal tradition, which in turn derived it from a Continental theory of politics that dates to the late Middle Ages at the birth of modernity itself—is that freedom is a natural right. It precedes politics and it precedes the state. The natural right to freedom need not be granted or earned or conferred. It need only be recognized as fact. It is something that exists in the absence of a systematic effort to take it away. The role of government is neither to grant rights nor to offer them some kind of permission to exist, but to restrain from violating them.

Kaine apparently rejects all of this and subscribes to some idea of “natural” law in which it is “the government” that decides what natural rights human beings enjoy. 

To say the least, this makes Kaine’s definition of natural rights extremely dangerous because Kaine’s idea of government-created rights opens a door for governments to redefine and abolish natural rights—i.e., property rights—as government lawmakers see fit. After all, if “rights” come from the government itself—as Kaine apparently believes—then the government can abolish those rights. 

This also helps illustrate why “creator-based” natural rights have been so instrumental and central to the classical liberals (i.e., Locke, Jefferson, Leggett, Cleveland, Spooner, Rothbard, etc.) who have attempted to fight against abuses of state power. Rockwell continues: 

The liberal tradition of the eighteenth century and following observed that it was government that has engaged in the most systematic efforts to rob people of their natural rights—the right to life, liberty, and property—and this is why the state must exist only with the permission of the people and be strictly limited to performing only essential tasks. To this agenda was this movement wholly and completely committed.

It is not surprising at all that a Senator like Tim Kaine would find the older liberal ideal of natural rights to be so “troubling.” By their very nature, natural rights that originate in “the creator” are beyond the reach of the state, and cannot be abolished by any government authority. Naturally, a modern social democrat like Kaine—who, in practice recognizes no limit to state power—would oppose this. 

[Read More: The Struggle for Liberty: A Libertarian History of Political Thought by Ralph Raico.]

[Read More: “Introduction to Natural Law“ by Murray Rothbard.] 

Image credit: US Dept. of Education, public domain.