A writer for The Atlantic has faulted Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy, who is in mutiny against the federal government, for his interpretation of states’ rights. No wonder. The progressive magazine’s scribe views states’ rights much as the Beltway-based lite libertarian would—he thinks that the division of powers between state governments and the federal government has left the states in charge of pot, poker and porn. The proper expression of “genuine states’ rights,” opines The Atlantic, is passing “permissive laws on divorce, gambling, and prostitution,” “abortion and same-sex marriage.”

I guess cleaving to a somewhat frivolous notion of states’ rights is better than framing a conflict that has roiled the country as no more than a local skirmish. The last bit of casuistry belongs to the Washington Post.

Farmer Bundy is no lifestyle libertarian; he’s a hardcore libertarian—a libertarian who rejects federal authority over state land and does not recognize the federal government. Bundy faced down the goons from the federal Bureau of Land Management. They had come to steal his livestock, in lieu of back taxes the BLM claims the rancher owes it since 1993, which was when Bundy stopped paying grazing fees.

The Bundys of Bunkerville, Nevada, had homesteaded the disputed land, southwest of Mesquite, in 1877. Bundy’s forefathers had lived off the land well before the Bureau of Land Grabs came into being. The feds subsequently passed laws usurping Bundy’s natural right to graze his cattle. The elderly rancher offered the following rejoinder: “‘I have raised cattle on that land, which is public land for the people of Clark County, all my life. Why I raise cattle there and why I can raise cattle there is because I have preemptive rights,’ among them the right to forage.”

BOTH SIDES SIDE WITH THE STATE, AND AGAINST THE NATURAL LAW

“Everybody else is paying their grazing fees,” intoned Democratic strategist Donna Brazil. “He should pay his fees as well.” With some variation, that’s the standard line from both political factions. However, from the fact that “everybody else” is paying the mafia for fear of being kneecapped—it doesn’t necessarily follow that “everybody” should fork over shakedown fees.

For their part, conservatives have not disputed the state’s case; they’ve merely argued an excessive use of force by the federal government. Fox News’ Britt Hume cringed when questioned about Bundy, whose disobedience he vehemently denounced. The feds have the law on their side, pondered anchor Megyn Kelly. How could they have gone so wrong while being so “right”? So too was the libertarian-leaning Tucker Carlson adamant that the Bundys didn’t have a legal leg to stand on. The woefully misguided Mr. Carlson purported to alert dissenters to “the essence of private property” and the principles that “undergird conservatism.” “This land does not belong to [the Bundys],” he asserted. Let Bundy buy his own.

Lectured Bill O’Reilly: “The government has a right to put a lien on Bundy’s property.” Correction: Government has the power to put a lien on Bundy’s property. Whether it has the right to so do is far from established. And therein lies the rub: The government has a monopoly over making and enforcing law— it decides what is legal and what isn’t. Thus it behooves thinking people to question the monopolist and his laws. After all, cautioned the great Southern constitutional scholar James McClellan, “What is legally just, may not be what is naturally just.” “Statutory man-made law” is not necessarily just law.

Naturally, and without knowing it, Bundy speaks the language of natural law. His case against the federal occupier, moreover, cannot stand or be understood without reference to a free man’s natural, unassailable right to own himself and that which sustains his life, free of unprovoked aggression.

NO SUCH THING AS ‘GOVERNMENT GRASS’

Unlike the positive law, which is state-created; natural law in not enacted. Rather, it is a higher law—a system of ethics—knowable through reason, revelation and experience. “By natural law,” propounded McClellan in “Liberty, Order, And Justice,” “we mean those principles which are inherent in man’s nature as a rational, moral, and social being, and which cannot be casually ignored.”

Tamara Holder, another Democrat, grasps the natural law not at all. “Can I go into your house and steal stuff; can I trespass onto your land?” she hollered at Sean Hannity. Holder, of course, was implying that the disputed land belonged to the state and was as good as the government’s house.

In siding with the heroic homesteader against the BLM, Mr. Hannity’s heart is in the right place. He and Fox News colleague Greta Van Susteren probably staved off a Waco-style massacre, in Bunkerville. When the militarized BLM, SAWT teams and all, trained sights on the Bundy family and their supporters; the two turned the cameras on the aggressors, who then retreated. In the course of butting against buttheads like Holder, however, Mr. Hannity has refused to engage his head. (The anchor, moreover, is performing no public service when he gives this and other prototypical TV tarts a platform from which to spread ignorance.) Ms. Holder: the government doesn’t have a house. There is no such thing as “government grass”! Not in natural law. Government cannot morally claim to own “public property,” explain Linda and Morris Tannehill, in “The Market For Liberty.” “Government doesn’t produce anything. Whatever it has, it has as a result of expropriation. It is no more correct to call the expropriated wealth in government’s possession property than it is to say that a thief rightfully owns the loot he has stolen.”

Then there is the matter of logic. “The public” is an abstraction. In logic, an abstraction cannot possess property. To borrow from libertarian political philosopher Murray Rothbard, “There is no existing entity called ‘society’—there are only interacting individuals.” To say that “society” should own property in common is essentially to say that “government bureaucrats” should own property, in our case, at the expense of the dispossessed homesteader.

LOCKEAN HOMESTEADING

Nowhere in the course of this piss-poor debate about the vanishing private-property rights of Cliven Bundy has John Locke’s thinking on the homesteading of property been mentioned. According to The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “John Locke (1632–1704) is among the most influential political philosophers of the modern period,” whose “treatment of property is generally thought to be among his most important contributions in political thought.” Locke’s philosophy of natural rights informed the Founding Fathers’ ideas about the natural rights to “life, liberty, and estate.” Locke’s natural-rights doctrine found expression in the Declaration of Independence—the preamble, in particular—and in the thought of Thomas Jefferson.

Property, argued Locke, in “Two Treaties of Government,” begins in “the taking of any part of what is common, and removing it out of the state Nature.” When life-sustaining resources are in their natural state, “there must of necessity be a means to appropriate them some way or other before they can be of any use, or at all beneficial, to any particular men.” “And the taking of this or that part does not depend on the express consent of [mankind].”

Thus, “The fruit or venison which nourishes the wild Indian, who knows no enclosure, and is still a tenant in common, must be his, and so his—i.e., a part of him, that another can no longer have any right to it before it can do him any good for the support of his life,” contended Locke. And, “the grass my horse has bit, the turfs my servant has cut, and the ore I have digged in any place, where I have a right to them in common with others, become my property without the assignation or consent of anybody.” (Chapter 5: “Of Property”)

At the very least, Cliven Bundy possesses indisputable prescriptive rights to the land. A form of homesteading, prescriptive rights come about through protracted use of an unused tract of land.

Whether arrived at through reason or revelation—whichever floats your boat—natural law is the highest law known to man. It is anchored in the very existential nature of man and is therefore a priori just. To go by the once-proud Western tradition of natural law—it originated with the ancient Hebrews and Greeks—the government most certainly does not own the Clark County land that sustains rancher Bundy’s livestock, and, by extension, his life.

Piers Morgan is preaching treason from his perch at CNN—and not because he is undermining the dead-letter US Constitution, as some have claimed.

Most people would define treason as a betrayal of one’s country or sovereign. In my book, the book of natural law, treason is properly defined as a betrayal of one’s countrymen—and, in particular, the betrayal of the individual’s right to life, liberty and property. (To your question, yes, this renders almost all politicians traitors by definition.)

A right that can’t be defended is a right in name only. If you cannot by law defend your life, you have no right to life. If you cannot defend your property, you have no right of private property. And if you cannot defend your liberty, you are not a free man.

It follows that inherent in the idea of an inalienable right is the right to mount a vigorous defense of the same rights.

Knowing full well that a mere ban on assault rifles would not give him the result he craved, our redcoat turncoat has structured his monocausal appeals against the individual’s right to bear arms as follows:

1) The UK once experienced Sandy-Hook like massacres.
2) We Brits banned allguns, pistols too.
3) There were no more such massacres.

Were Morgan agitating for the repeal of the 16th Amendment to the Constitution—I’d call him a patriot, although he’d be preaching against the Constitution. My Amendment bias, why? The Constitution itself, in places, undermines individual rights. Therefore, to the extent that the document comports with the natural law, to that extent the Constitution is a good thing; to the extent that it flouts natural justice, it is bad. Inescapably—and more often than not—natural justice therein has been buried under the rubble of legislation and statute.

Thus, it is not Piers’ “attack on the 2nd Amendment” per se that makes him a traitor; it is that the 2nd Amendment is natural law, namely, it is based on a universally accepted, timeless moral principle. Because he is undermining this immutable principle, Morgan is suborning treason against his countrymen.

Conversely, the 16th Amendment—the number of the beast, I call it—is a species of law with which Piers and statists like him identify; it is legal positivism, or “man-made law.” Put it this way: God’s law the 16th Amendment is not. The tithe of Mosaic Law was a moral imperative; it was not backed by the power of a police state. “New Testament giving” is voluntary. Nor does the 16th qualify as law rooted in reason, for this abominable amendment gives government a potentially limitless lien on a man’s property and, by extension, on his life.

To sum, the insufferably pompous Piers is intent on helping obliterate an American’s right to self-defense (which the US Constitution so happens to affirm).

This week, the CNN host will be fulminating over the shortfalls of 23 new imperial orders against firearm owners and in furtherance of federal tyranny. Piers believes the president’s extra-constitutional diktats don’t go far enough to void what’s left of the Constitutional scheme (to say nothing of the Hippocratic Oath. The Dear Leader has decreed that, “Doctors and other health care providers … need to be able to ask about firearms in their patients’ homes and safe storage of those firearms”).

Last year, an admirably rebellious Egyptian people revolted against President Mohamed Morsy for issuing a single executive order. America’s “King Tut” issued 23 such directives in one day! But—and by contrast—Piers thinks nothing of this “attempt by the [US] executive to make laws in violation of the Article 1, Sec. 8 of the Constitution,” seconds Sen. Rand Paul. With the arrival on the CNN set of the purveyor of pop spirituality Deepak Chopra, Piers’ peerless stupidity was almost usurped. “The 2nd Amendment didn’t take into account assault weapons,” chimed Chopra.

When they passed the 2nd Amendment, they had muskets. It took 20 minutes to load one, and half the time, you missed, OK? The 2nd Amendment didn’t take into account assault weapons, the fact that you can buy them through the secondary market or you can load up on ammunition through the Internet.

By logical extension, should not the 1st Amendment too be contingent on the extent to which technologies can be used to the detriment of some? During the founding, I presume, there were no megaphones or loudspeakers. Is Chopra implying that as offensive speech got louder and more easily transmittable, the Founders would have reconsidered the right of free speech? Regulated the Internet? Is anyone suggesting that, had the framers foreseen today’s particular technological innovations, they’d have written a different document?

The American Founding Fathers were sophisticated thinkers. Some were scientists and inventors. More so than Chopra—whose inspiration is eastern mambo-jumbo, and not philosopher John Locke—all were familiar with the idea of humanity’s unstoppable progress.

The Bill of Rights is a timeless document of individual liberties, setting limits on government power. The document was never meant to recalibrate individual liberties in light of each era’s technological innovations.

Alas, as reprehensible as Piers Morgan and his priestly cast of Hollywood and network twits are—and as much as he disgusts—we cannot shut this royal pillock up or deport him. We can only switch him off and wish him the worst.