Ayn Rand described racism as “the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism”. However, she wouldn’t and neither would most people with any measure of morality would describe a verbal expression of racism as being worse than murdering another.

A radical comedy today might parody modern “anti-racism” to a ridiculous absurdity, defending people from claims of racism over defending people from murder. 

Reality is not funny though.

British journalist Ed West wrote a few weeks ago on his Substack an article called “Moloch must be Fed”. 

He recalls the following instances…

Salman Abedi 

 “One evening in May 2017 a security guard in Manchester was alerted to something that didn’t look right: a man of Middle Eastern appearance with a rucksack was seen by a member of the public approaching a pop concert filled with teenage girls. The man looked ‘dodgy’, in the words of the 18-year-old guard, who later recalled his moment of agonising: ‘I felt unsure about what to do. It’s very difficult to define a terrorist. For all I knew he might well be an innocent Asian male. I did not want people to think I am stereotyping him because of his race. Concerned that he would be accused of racism, the young man went with his doubts and let the British-born Libyan Salman Abedi walk on. The rucksack was packed with homemade explosives, mixed with nuts and bolts to maximise the suffering they would inflict on human flesh, and fifteen minutes later Abedi pressed the detonator, killing 22 people, ten of them under 20 and the youngest aged just eight.”

Valdo Calocane

“had attacked his flatmate on one occasion, and assaulted strangers on others. He was clearly very dangerous, and while mental health professionals had been ‘leaning towards’ sectioning him, he was released after they ‘considered the research evidence that shows over-representation of young black males in detention’. Calocane went on to butcher three people in broad daylight, including two 19-year-old students from the same university”

Axel Rudakubana

“At the Acorns School in Ormskirk, headteacher Joanne Hodson said she felt a ‘visceral sense of dread.”.. about him, as he “had been caught bringing a knife into class in his previous school, and when Hodson asked him why, had replied coldly: ‘to use it’. When she raised the risk posed by the dread-inducing young male, mental health workers accused her of ‘racially stereotyping’ him as ‘a black boy with a knife’.”

Rudakubana went on to murder three girls, aged nine, seven and six at a dance workshop for girls aged six to eleven in Southport.

The story about Henry Nowak is giving cause for concern among many in the UK about the priorities of policing. The criminal justice system’s first priority should be to protect the public from violence.  The Daily Telegraph has published the sentencing notes for Nowak's murderer and the background to the case.

Nowak called out to Vikrum Digwa, and asked if he was a “bad man”, and filmed Digwa on his phone. Digwa, a Sikh, alleges his turban was knocked off by Nowak.  Digwa stabbed Nowak four times and his face was slashed.  One of the stabbings proved fatal. Digwa and his brother filmed Nowak escaping, scaling a fence before landing on a car and falling to the ground, where he bled to death. By then the Hampshire and Isle of Wight Constabulary had arrived. Digwa’s father was helping keep Nowak upright, but Digwa had told the police that Nowak had racially abused him. 

The teenager is then heard shouting in a hoarse voice “I’ve been stabbed, I can’t breathe, call an ambulance”.

Officers can then be heard asking Digwa for his version of events, before dragging Henry across the gravel while saying: “Let’s get you out of there, shall we?”

When the university student again told them he had been stabbed, the officer responded: “I don’t think you have, mate.”

Henry is then placed in handcuffs while repeatedly telling officers: “I can’t breathe.”

With the teenager in handcuffs, a female officer asks Henry, “where do you think you’ve been stabbed?” before saying to her colleague, “we have to check, don’t we”.

The near-three-minute footage ends with the arresting officer asking for Henry’s name, before reading him his rights.

At this point, the female officer seems to realise his deteriorating condition and calls an ambulance, noting that “his pupils aren’t even reacting”.

Nowak bled to death in handcuffs, because police were more concerned about Digwa’s claim of racism, than Nowak actually having been stabbed. 

Nowak calling “I can’t breathe” has shades of another event we all know, although there are multiple differences in the contexts, the primary point remained – the Hampshire and Isle of Wight Constabulary prioritised “anti-racism” over a murder.

Of course, the police were, in fact racist. It prioritised the feelings of one man who was hardly scratched over another bleeding to death, because of racism.

Many on the left in particular wonder why politicians they deem “far right” are getting popular appeal. I can’t imagine how blind they might be when these instances are happening, time and time again. The people who want to protect others, like the security guard, the teacher and most police, mean to do well.  They are undermined by a philosophy, which is advanced by academia, accepted by much of the media, absorbed by gateway professional associations and implemented by “professionals” and it is all facilitated by politicians.  

It’s a repeat story that could be a parody of a lunatic political philosophy if put into practice, if it weren’t a parody and hadn’t been put into practice. It is the application of today’s melding of various post-modernist philosophical movements into politics and into law and social/cultural practice. It combines Constructivism (which posits that there is no such thing as “objective truth” but rather reality is constructed by people as part of social processes, interests and beliefs), Structuralism (which posits that human behaviour can be understood through structures and systems within which they operate, rather than the specific behaviour itself and Critical Theory (which posits that injustice exists in current power structures which exist primarily to benefit and sustain those with power, who are deemed to be members of groups that created or succeed the most in those structures).

As with most philosophical movements, there is some truth in all of them in different contexts. However, the culmination of all of this applied consistently is that identical behaviour by two separate people is interpreted differently according to each person’s background and deemed level of privilege or disadvantage within the “system” they are living. Critical theory has little time for Common Law justice systems which treat individuals as free agents (unless proven otherwise) who, if they act to infringe upon the basic rights of other free agents, should be subject to judgment and punishment according to what they did and the harm they caused.  For example, while there may be mitigating circumstances in specific situations (e.g. self-defence), murder is murder. 

Objectivists, rationalists, classical liberals and other modernists regard racism as a pre-modernist view of humanity. The idea that human beings should be judged based on their inherited characteristics rather than their behaviour, is a legacy of pre-modernity. Race or ethnicity is not determinative of unjust behaviour, and especially not determinative of justifying injustice against that person. Awareness of this grew enormously in the aftermath of World War Two, the Holocaust, the legacy of Japanese militarism and subsequently decolonisation of much of the world, and the Civil Rights movement in the USA have made people aware of the need to treat people as they are, not for what they are.

In almost all societies deliberately killing another person, especially a child, is seen as the most morally depraved and injust act that can be committed. Yet in the UK today, there is a growing number of incidents whereby people, when judging whether to act to protect others from murder, have chosen to act based on another concern – is my action going to be seen as racist?

London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2015
176 pp. $9.90 (paperback).

Mother Courage and Her Children is widely regarded as a brilliant, clinical dissection of wartime economies and as the pinnacle of epic theater.1 Yet its precise theme masks a profound dramatic failure. By taking away the titular character’s power to choose and using her merely to prove a point, playwright Bertolt Brecht denies her the moral realization that gives tragedy its meaning. What might have been a profound human drama instead becomes a political demonstration—one that replaces the struggle of a person capable of moral choices with the static passivity of an ideological illustration.

Critics praise the play’s intellectual ambition, structural innovation, and use of the “alienation effect,” a technique intended to discourage audiences from becoming emotionally absorbed in the drama and to instead encourage them to analyze the effects of the material conditions at work on stage.2

Mother Courage and Her Children takes place during the Thirty Years’ War and follows Anna Fierling (known as Mother Courage) as she travels across Europe with a wagon selling food, alcohol, and supplies to soldiers. War enables her livelihood; over the course of the play, however, the conflict that sustains her business gradually destroys her family.

At first glance, the structure of the play appears ideally suited to tragedy: A parent attempts to survive within a brutal social environment only to discover that the system she depends on exacts a terrible personal price. In classical tragedy, such suffering leads to recognition; the protagonist comes to understand the moral meaning of her own actions. Aristotle called this moment anagnorisis: a realization that transforms misfortune into insight and gives the tragedy its emotional and philosophic resolution.3 Brecht, however, deliberately denies us this moment. As he argued: “it is not the business of the playwright to arm Mother Courage with insight. . . she is a merchant, and her business is her ruin.”4

His thesis is that war is an economic system that rewards and destroys its participants simultaneously. To underscore the inescapable nature of this system, Brecht ensures that Mother Courage never learns.5 By denying her a moment of realization, he attempts to demonstrate that, once one is profit-bound to the machinery of war, there is no exit. She never confronts the lethal connection between her livelihood and her losses—she simply continues to pull the wagon and so remains a prisoner of her own choices.

This lack of development is a direct result of Brecht’s theory of epic theater. He does not want us to feel empathy for Mother Courage—he wants us to judge her. This distancing effect is established in the very first scene, when the cold logic of the wartime economy is laid bare. A recruiter challenges Mother Courage, singing “Like the war to nourish you? / Have to feed it something too” (13).

With this line, Brecht begins to reveal Mother Courage’s role not as a developing human soul but as a figure driven by the mercenary logic of the battlefield. She acts as a small entrepreneur seeking to profit from the slaughter, attempting the impossible task of remaining morally detached from the very violence that sustains her livelihood.

Nothing illustrates Brecht’s subordination of drama to ideology more chillingly than the death of her grown son Swiss Cheese in scene three.6 When Mother Courage learns that a bribe of two hundred florins can save him, her immediate reaction is not a mother’s desperation but a merchant’s calculation. She pivots quickly to haggling: “Two hundred’s too much for me . . . tell them I’ll pay hundred and twenty florins, else it’s all off” (40–42).

This moment is the structural heart of Brecht’s demonstration. Even with her son’s life on the line, Mother Courage fails to earn her nickname. She attempts to justify her hesitation by claiming that she must “keep a bit back” to ensure that she isn’t shoved into a ditch by the next “Tom, Dick and Harry.” She is so focused on her startup capital for a new life—calculating that, with eighty florins, she could “fill a pack with goods and start again”—that she explicitly allows the murder of her own son. The cost of this economic hesitation is exactly: “Eleven bullets they gave him, that’s all” (40–44).

The scene concludes with a moment that strips the protagonist of her last vestige of humanity. She denies her own son, driven by the belief that her survival and business depend on it. As a sergeant shows her the body and asks “Know him?”, she simply shakes her head. In Brecht’s view, this is the ultimate evidence that the wartime system destroys the human soul. But from a dramatic standpoint, it feels like the conclusion of a mathematical proof. Brecht ensures that the “haggling,” as an army chaplain later describes her cold negotiation, leads to death so that the audience will learn the lesson. By doing so, he succeeds in making a political point, but he fails to allow Mother Courage the moral recognition that would help the audience understand the intellectual point by making them feel the tragedy of her story—which is the entire point of fiction.

Brecht’s ideological point is clear: Mother Courage has become so corrupted that even the life of her child is subject to a financial cost-benefit analysis. But from a dramatic perspective, this scene reveals Brecht’s fundamental misunderstanding of the basic purpose of fiction. The way in which Brecht has his protagonist prioritize her wagon over her son’s life doesn’t explore the depths of human grief or the complexity of a mother’s soul—it is economic soapboxing. He denies her the visceral, desperate response we expect from a parent, ensuring instead that she remains a hollow vessel for his critique of war as the ultimate “capitalist” enterprise.

The reason lies in his theory of epic theater.7 Unlike genuine drama, which gives the audience reasons to identify emotionally with the characters, Brecht seeks in his plays to maintain distance between audience and performance. Songs interrupt scenes rather than adding to or connecting them, as they would in a musical or with a classical chorus. Additionally, narratively fragmented episodes replace continuous narrative development, and characters often function less as psychologically complex individuals than as archetypes of social roles.

These techniques are intended to provoke analysis rather than empathy and are predicated on the false dichotomy that the two are necessarily opposed. Brecht operates on the belief that, for the audience to observe the mechanisms of war and society objectively, such mechanisms must be stripped of emotional weight. However, this rigid separation ignores the possibility that empathizing with Mother Courage could actually deepen the viewer’s understanding of her context. Instead, Brecht asks his audience to judge the system, assuming that one cannot—or should not—both feel and think simultaneously.

Within this framework, Mother Courage becomes a figure illustrating a broader social dynamic: the small entrepreneur who attempts to profit from war while convincing herself that she can remain morally detached from its consequences. Brecht’s point is clear: War does not merely destroy lives directly—it also encourages individuals to participate in systems that ultimately destroy them. Yet the method Brecht employs to deliver his message comes at a cost.

As the play progresses, Mother Courage suffers a series of devastating losses. However, these are not mere accidents of war—they are tragedies in which Courage is deeply complicit. Each child’s death is a direct consequence of her prioritizing the “business of war” over the child’s safety. Her son Eilif is recruited while Mother Courage is distracted by a potential sale, a choice that exposes a moral vacuum created by his mother’s priorities. While her daughter Kattrin chooses to trade her life for the safety of a city, Courage is elsewhere, attempting to profit from the city’s impending destruction. Courage’s complicity lies not in pulling the trigger but in her absence; by prioritizing the “logic of the wagon” over her presence as a mother, she invites the tragedy she claims to be working to prevent.

These moments could provide opportunities for psychological transformation if she were to reconsider the ruthless assumptions that govern her life.8 Instead, the play systematically prevents such development.

At the conclusion of the drama, after losing all of her children, Mother Courage does not undergo a change of character. She does not abandon the behaviors that destroyed her family. She does not reach a moment of moral clarity. Instead, she straps herself to the wagon and continues following the army.

From Brecht’s perspective, this ending is essential. If Mother Courage were to learn from her experience, the audience might leave the theater with a sense of emotional resolution. Brecht wishes to deny that resolution—not as an end in itself but as a means to focus the audience’s attention on the system that traps her.9

The problem with this approach is that it transforms Mother Courage from a dramatic protagonist into a didactic device. Her suffering illustrates Brecht’s thesis, but it does not produce a fully realized human journey. Instead of witnessing a person grappling with moral consequences, the audience observes a deterministic demonstration of Brecht’s economic views. Any work that seeks to demonstrate a truth about the human experience while denying its characters humanity necessarily undermines itself.

Great drama emerges from the tension between individuals (or within the same individual) over differing ideas. Great characters embody philosophic or sociological principles, but they also challenge them through their actions and choices. When a playwright removes that tension from the story instead of letting the characters resolve it, the drama loses its human center.

To be fair, Mother Courage contains moments of undeniable theatrical power. The recurring image of Mother Courage pulling her wagon across a devastated landscape is one of the most haunting symbols in modern theater. The wagon represents survival, commerce, stubbornness, and tragic blindness all at once. The play also captures an uncomfortable truth about human behavior in times of conflict: Individuals frequently adapt to destructive systems rather than resist them. They rationalize participation in those systems even when the consequences become increasingly catastrophic. Brecht portrays this dynamic with remarkable precision.

The true tragedy of Mother Courage and Her Children is not that the protagonist loses everything but that she learns nothing. In the final moments of scene twelve, after burying her last child, Mother Courage performs an act that is both physically and symbolically devastating: She harnesses herself to the cart (86–88). This stage direction is the culmination of Brecht’s ideological trap. Throughout the play, her children were the ones who pulled the wagon; they were the motors of her business. With them dead, she does not abandon the trade that killed them. Instead, she replaces them, declaring “Hope I can pull cart all right by meself . . . Got to get back in business again.” By the time the offstage chorus begins the final song, the play’s thesis has been fully realized. The lyrics remind us that “The war is dragging on a bit / Another hundred years or longer,” and that although “the dead remain,” life—or rather, the machine of war—simply “staggers to its feet again.” Courage’s decision to shout “Take me along!” to the passing regiment is not a sign of resilience—it is a sign of total moral capitulation (88). She has devolved from a hopeful opportunist into a perpetuator of the very wartime economy she once sought to exploit.

Nearly a century after its creation, Brecht’s critically acclaimed play continues to provoke admiration for its intellectual rigor. He succeeded brilliantly in showing us how people can hollow out their own souls. However, by removing the tension central to fiction, Brecht sacrificed the human center of his drama.

In a genuine tragedy, the protagonist’s suffering leads to a transformative insight that gives the loss meaning. In Mother Courage, there is no such insight—only the endless, circular motion of the wagon. Brecht wanted the audience to learn the lesson that his character could not. But in his attempt, he turned what could have been a profound human journey into a cold political demonstration. The audience leaves the theater with a clear thesis, but the character remains trapped in a loop of blindness. In the end, Brecht’s ideological commitment is so absolute that it denies Mother Courage the one thing she needed to become truly tragic: the agency to understand her own story.

This article appears in the Summer 2026 issue of The Objective Standard.

America! America!
God mend thine every flaw,
Confirm thy soul in self-control,
Thy liberty in law!

Despite the flaw, those are my favorite lines from Katharine Lee Bates’s “America the Beautiful.”

America is beautiful. But why? What makes it beautiful? And what could make it even more beautiful?

What makes America beautiful is its founding principle: individual rights—the idea that each individual has a moral prerogative to take the actions necessary to support and further his life (the right to life); to act in accordance with his own judgment, free from coercion (liberty); to keep and use the product of his effort (property); and to pursue the values and goals of his choice (the pursuit of happiness).

What could make America more beautiful is for Americans to better understand and protect rights.

Are rights real? Is there evidence to support them? If so, what is the evidence? And are rights inalienable—such that neither individuals, groups, nor governments can revoke them or take them away? If so, how do we know it? What evidence supports this?

Some Americans, including the nation’s founders and religious conservatives, believe that people have rights because a “Creator” or “God” endowed us with them. For instance, the Declaration of Independence states, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Although this conception of rights served to establish America, it has not served—and cannot serve—to sustain America. This is because there is no evidence for the existence of a Creator, much less evidence to support the notion that rights somehow emanate from His will.

Since the founding of America, positivists, utilitarians, materialists, postmodernists, and other critics of rights have taken advantage of this lack of evidence. They have mocked the idea of inalienable rights—rights that exist prior to governments, rights that, as the Declaration notes, governments are instituted to secure. The idea of “rights anterior to the establishment of government,” wrote philosopher Jeremy Bentham, is “rhetorical nonsense—nonsense upon stilts.” Why? Because, Bentham insisted, rights “are the fruits of the law, and of the law alone.”1 The idea of inalienable rights, wrote philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, is “one with witches and unicorns.” Why? Because no one has provided evidence for such rights; thus “every attempt to give good reasons for believing that there are such rights has failed.”2 Yuval Noah Harari says that “rights are just like heaven and like God.” Why? Because, like heaven and God, there is no evidence for their existence. “Take a human, cut him open, look inside,” quips Harari. “You find blood, and you find the heart and lungs and kidneys, but you don’t find any rights.”3

The idea that inalienable rights are nonsense on the grounds that no evidence supports them is widespread among today’s philosophers and intellectuals, and it is undermining the very foundation of America. If there is no evidence for the existence of rights that precede governments, then what we call “rights” are not really rights but rather laws or permissions granted by governments. On this conception of “rights,” governments create laws, and the laws dictate the “rights” and “non-rights” of the people who live under those governments. In short, the government’s laws simply are the citizens’ rights.

If rights are merely permissions created by a government via law, then no legal action can violate rights. Whatever the law permits is a right; whatever it forbids is not.

Taken seriously, this means that in National Socialist Germany, the so-called Aryans had a right to throw Jews into concentration camps and gas chambers because Nazi law permitted it. In the antebellum South, white people had a right to enslave black people because their states’ laws permitted it. And in Islamic theocracies, the mullahs and “morality police” have a right to hang gay people from cranes or throw them off rooftops—and the right to punish women for exposing their ankles or for having been raped—because their governments’ laws permit it.

Thankfully, America is nowhere near such horrors today. But what is to stop us from moving in that direction? What is to stop America the beautiful from becoming America the terrible?

Consider the following, and ask yourself whether Americans and the American legal system are treating rights as moral principles that limit governments—or as “fruits of the law” such that governments may do whatever their laws permit.

• When, under civil asset forfeiture laws, governments seize a person’s cash, car, or other property without convicting him of a crime (as federal, state, and local governments do), does this violate his rights—or protect rights by enforcing the law?

• When the Food and Drug Administration forbids patients from contracting voluntarily with their doctors to receive medications or treatments that could save their lives (as the FDA does), does this violate the rights of patients and doctors—or uphold rights by enforcing the law?

• When a city or state forbids people from starting a small business—say, selling food or braiding hair—unless they first obtain an expensive government-approved license or permit (as many cities and states do), does this violate the rights of peaceful people to earn a living—or protect rights by enforcing the law?

• When governors order businesses to close for weeks on end, thus destroying or damaging the livelihoods of the business owners and their employees (as many governors did during COVID-19), does this violate individuals’ rights—or protect rights by enforcing the law?

• If a government passes a law requiring people to use others’ preferred pronouns (as some states and localities have attempted to do, and many people want them to do), does this violate people’s right to freedom of speech—or protect rights by enforcing the law?

• If a state levies a special tax on residents above a certain net worth (as supporters of California’s 2026 Billionaire Tax Act propose), does this violate their property rights—or protect rights in compliance with the law?

• If Americans elect politicians who nationalize industry, abolish private property, and subordinate individuals to the collective or “common good” (as various intellectuals, college professors, and politicians advocate), would this violate anyone’s rights—or would it protect everyone’s rights because it’s the law?

• Alternatively, if Americans elect politicians who make biblical law the law of the land, punishing blasphemy, homosexuality, and religious dissent (as religious people who take biblical law seriously advocate), would this violate anyone’s rights—or would everyone’s rights be upheld because religious dogma had become political law?

If the only “rights” human beings have are those established by a government’s laws, then governments are not and cannot be limited by rights. If so, the American system of government, which is based on inalienable rights, is based on nothing at all. It is a sham. Consequently, there is nothing to stop the land of liberty from becoming just another tract of tyranny.

The bad news is that the idea of rights as “fruits of law” is precisely what today’s journalists, legal scholars, and college professors are teaching the rising generations—and have been for decades. To wit:

Harvard-educated E. J. Dionne Jr.—a longtime Washington Post editor and columnist, now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a professor at Georgetown University—insists in both a Washington Post op-ed and a commencement speech to graduates of the University of Pittsburgh: “Absent a government committed to the protection of rights, there are no rights.”4

Law professors Stephen Holmes and Cass Sunstein—respectively professors at New York University School of Law and Harvard Law School, both of whom previously taught at the University of Chicago—write that “Under American law, rights are powers granted by the political community.” Indeed, Holmes and Sunstein clarify, this means “individual rights and freedoms depend fundamentally on vigorous state action”—such that even “the right against being tortured by police officers and prison guards” exists only insofar as a government’s laws and legal machinery protect people against such practices.5

Raymond Geuss—an American political philosopher who has taught at Princeton University, Columbia University, and the University of Chicago—writes that a right is a “construct of a particular legal system,” meaning that its “real locus” is not in human nature but in “positive legal codes.” To claim otherwise, he says, is to “delude yourself” and to engage in “puffery or white magic.”6

This is what American college students and Americans in general are being taught about rights: They are merely the laws that governments pass and enforce. To defend inalienable rights—and thus the very foundation of America—against this fundamental and expanding assault, we need an evidence-based, demonstrably true conception of rights.

The good news is that rights are real. They exist. But, like many things that exist—such as justice, honesty, sarcasm, and logic—rights are not perceivable: We cannot see, touch, taste, or hear them. Rights are highly abstract principles that arise from and depend on various other ideas and conceptual integrations that ultimately are grounded in facts we can perceive.

To understand the source and nature of rights, and why they are inalienable, we must identify the facts and ideas that give rise to them and connect them to perceptual reality. The American philosopher Ayn Rand did just that.

Rand conceived of rights as identifications or recognitions of certain facts—namely, the social conditions required for human beings to live together peacefully.7 And when you see rights this way, far from being nonsense, they make perfect sense.

Rand observed that if and to the extent that people, groups, or governments use physical force or coercion against an individual, the individual cannot act fully as his life requires. The principle of individual rights is the recognition of this fact. And the specific rights—such as the rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness—are recognitions of this same fact regarding specific spheres of concern. For each right, there is a principle, which is the recognition of a particular fact—and a corresponding moral prerogative to act accordingly, which is what it means to have the right in question.

The right to life, on this view, is the broadest and most fundamental right. The principle here is the recognition of the fact that for a person to live, he must be free to take all the actions necessary to support and further his life while refraining from violating the same rights of others (more on this below). To the extent that other people, groups, or governments forcibly stop him from acting as his life requires, he cannot act fully as his life requires. For instance, to live, a person must produce goods (or services) and either use them or trade them with others. (The only alternative is to survive parasitically on others who produce life-serving goods.) If a “slave master” or socialist government or theocratic regime forces him into a cotton field, a concentration camp, or a noose, he cannot live fully as his life requires. He cannot live a fully human life. This is not “nonsense” or “white magic” or like “witches and unicorns”; nor does it depend on or have anything to do with an alleged Creator somehow endowing people with rights. Rather, it is a recognition of a fact about the world and human life. It is a truth grasped by means of reason. And for someone to possess the right to life is for him to have a moral prerogative to act in accordance with the corresponding principle: as his life requires.

Likewise, the right to liberty is the recognition of the fact that for a person to live, he must be free to act on the judgment of his mind, which is his basic means of living. To the extent that other people, groups, or governments forcibly stop him from doing so, he cannot act in accordance with his judgment. If he judges that he should start a business braiding hair, and if a government physically stops him from acting accordingly because he doesn’t have a government-authorized license to braid hair, then, to that extent, he cannot act on his judgment; he cannot act on his basic means of living; thus he cannot live fully as a human being. Here again, to possess the right is to have a moral prerogative to act in accordance with the corresponding principle: A human life is a life guided by the judgment of one’s own mind. And here, too, this is not “nonsense” or “white magic” or in any way dependent on a Creator. Rather, it is a recognition of a fact. It is a product of reason.

Similarly, the right to property is the recognition of the fact that for a person to live, he must be free to keep and use the goods he produces. To the extent that other people coercively stop him from doing so, he cannot keep or use his property; thus, he cannot live a fully human life. For instance, if he farms for a living, and if the government takes 30 percent of his earnings, then he cannot use that 30 percent to sustain or further his life. And that 30 percent represents real time, effort, and resources that he spent earning the money. To forcibly take this money is to forcibly take that portion of his life—by retroactively converting his work into involuntary servitude. This is neither “nonsense” nor “puffery.” It is a recognition of a fact—a product of reason. And individuals possess the right to property in light of this fact.

Finally, the right to the pursuit of happiness is the recognition of the fact that for a person to pursue the goals and values of his choice, he must be free to do so. To the extent that other people force him to act against his chosen aims, he cannot act in accordance with his chosen aims; thus, he cannot live fully as a human being. If a girl chooses to remove her headscarf and dance, but the “morality police” arrest or kill her for doing so, she cannot pursue the goals and values of her choice; she cannot live a fully human life. Likewise, if someone chooses to take psilocybin to overcome a psychological problem, and the “medication police” arrest him for doing so, he cannot pursue the goals or values of his choice; he cannot live a fully human life. In light of the corresponding observation-based principle, human beings have the right to the pursuit of happiness: the moral prerogative to pursue the goals and values of their choice.

Each of these rights—to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness—applies to human beings as such, on the grounds that they are humans, that they are individuals, and that acting in accordance with the judgment of their own minds is essential to living human lives.

Such fact-based rights exist in that we can observe the facts that give rise to and support the respective principles. And such fact-based rights are inalienable in that they preexist governments and cannot be revoked: One cannot revoke a basic fact of reality or human nature.

Of course, other people and governments can violate an individual’s rights—and frequently do—by initiating or threatening physical force against him, thereby stopping him from acting in accordance with his own judgment. But other people cannot revoke or remove an individual’s rights. The only person who can remove an individual’s rights is that individual himself. And the only way he can do so is by violating the rights of others—that is, by initiating or threatening physical force against them and thus throttling or thwarting their ability to act in accordance with their judgment. If and to the extent that a person initiates physical force against others, whether directly (e.g., assault or rape) or indirectly (e.g., fraud or extortion), he—of his own accord—forfeits his moral prerogatives, his rights, in proportion to his violation of the rights of others. A rational, rights-protecting legal system adjudicates rights violations and punishes rights violators accordingly.8

Rand’s theory of rights is based on her broader moral theory, rational egoism, wherein the factual requirements of human life constitute the standard of moral value—the standard by which we can measure the rightness or wrongness of chosen human actions. This standard, too, is supported by perceptual observations and conceptual integrations of reality and human nature.9

There is a great deal more to the observations and integrations that undergird, support, and give rise to inalienable rights. But the foregoing indicates how such rights are derived from and grounded in perceptual reality—facts we can see.

Seen in this light, rights are neither endowments from God nor grants from governments. Nor are they “nonsense upon stilts” or like “witches and unicorns.” Rather, rights are recognitions of facts about human beings and human nature—namely, that for human beings to live fully as human beings, they must be free to act in accordance with the faculty that makes them human: their reasoning minds.

This evidence-based conception of rights resolves the deficiency in the God-based conception expressed in the Declaration of Independence. Rights are real, but not because God gave them to us. They are real because they are identifications of the factual requirements of human life in a social context. With this understanding, Americans can move past the otherworldly, passivity-laden prayer “America! God mend thine every flaw”—and embrace the earthly, agency-driven mission: America! We the people will mend thine every flaw.

Yes, we can mend America’s every flaw. We can do so by grasping and upholding the rational, observation-based principle of inalienable rights. And when we do, we can call it America the rational. That will be beautiful.

This article appears in the Summer 2026 issue of The Objective Standard.

SARAH HOYT’S SHOCKED FACE IS RESTING COMFORTABLY:

Anti-ICE agitator who allegedly bit officers during Delaney Hall protest was previously accused of distributing child porn https://t.co/PYe4JAZX9C pic.twitter.com/UfDzRe8RY7

— New York Post (@nypost) June 1, 2026