… is from page 289 of the great Harvard historian Richard Pipes’s 1999 volume, Property and Freedom:
Rights, in any meaningful sense, are natural rights, not those bestowed by legislative fiat.
Failure to understand Pipes’s point reflects a failure to understand what is perhaps the single most crucial aspect of society: social order is “the result of human action but not of human design.”
It’s an immensely curious fact about modern “Progressives” that they dismiss as intellectually handicapped or hopelessly superstitious (or both) those who deny the full reality and role of undesigned, evolved order in the non-human world (especially in the realms of biology, geology, and astronomy), but regard as enlightened and indisputably correct those those who deny the full reality and role of undesigned, evolved order in society.
