Many documents now echo the phrase used in the United States Declaration of Independence. The preamble to the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights asserts that rights are inalienable: "recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world." However, there is still much dispute over which "rights" are truly natural rights and which are not, and the concept of natural or inalienable rights is still controversial to some.
Contemporary political philosophies continuing the liberal tradition of natural rights include libertarianism, anarcho-capitalism and Objectivism, and include amongst their canon the works of authors such as Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, Ayn Rand, and Murray Rothbard. A libertarian view of inalienable rights is laid out in Morris and Linda Tannehill's The Market for Liberty, which claims that a man has a right to ownership over his life and therefore also his property, because he has invested time (i.e. part of his life) in it and thereby made it an extension of his life. However, if he initiates force against and to the detriment of another man, he alienates himself from the right to that part of his life which is required to pay his debt: "Rights are not inalienable, but only the possessor of a right can alienate himself from that right – no one else can take a man's rights from him
I emphasized the one part, as I find it fairly interesting. You keep your life asw long as you do not initiate force against another, but then you only lose that part of your life in which you initiated such force. This would create a liberty interest in that the continued 'civil' punishments laid upon us AFTER we have completed time under the hand of law would be in direct violation of the life,liberty, pursuit of happiness granted by the Declaration of Independence.
One interesting opinion from the Supreme Court was this:
Earlier judicial opinion, in Butchers' Union Co. v. Crescent City Co., 111 U.S. 746 (1883)[5], had, however, considered Jefferson's phrase in the Declaration of Independence to refer to one's economic vocation of choice rather than the more ephemeral search for emotional fulfillment, even though one may be predicated on the other. U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Stephen Johnson Field, in his concurring opinion to Associate Justice Samuel Freeman Miller's opinion, wrote:
Among these inalienable rights, as proclaimed in that great document, is the right of men to pursue their happiness, by which is meant the right to pursue any lawful business or vocation, in any manner not inconsistent with the equal rights of others, which may increase their prosperity or develop their faculties, so as to give to them their highest enjoyment.
But the registry stops those of us on it from doing that. The registry is the sole creator of no less than 7 jobless states that I have seen for myself in the last 11 years. So it violates the premise of liberty regarding happiness.
