Rhetoric about rights obscures reality.

David, review Thomas Hobbes, whose views shape mine.

Government by definition enjoys a monopoly on the use of physical force in a society, or it ceases to govern. Witness Mexico.

This writer follows Hobbes who puts physical force as the source of civil order or disorder, depending on who uses it.

If government fails to govern, maintain order and a monopoly on physical force, we open the "box" to each and every man for himself, the "first position" of humans on this planet.

The control of violence is not pacifism, for to control the use of violence requires the use of violence good and hard to maintain order,as Hobbes observes. The Romans understood this. They did not maintain order with psycho-babble and legalisms about rights. They used force good and hard, and it produced results.

Therefore, to disturb this monopoly of force on the part of government is to create a Mafia world, and we are moving this way.

John Locke, a contemporary of Hobbes, prattled on about rights. Hobbes said in effect the desire to physically survive trumps rights dreamed up by lawyers, business people, and idealists.

Hobbes and Locke lived at the time of the English Civil War, which was settled, as was ours, not by lawyers, but by force, good and hard. Revisit Oliver Cromwell here.

Americans suffer from the fact that the people who wrote our founding documents were lawyers and merchants, but it was Washington who settled the issue, and he was not a lawyer prattling about rights.

The first order of business is physical survival, safety, as Hobbes observed. We fool ourselves about the origins of this basic civil order, and it is not lawyers, economists, pacifists, etc.

It is the use of force to govern and to keep the vermin in place, check. The American romance with lawyers and related contract thinking obscures this reality, and it is leading us into the night, and not a pacifist bedtime story.