This article was originally published on June 17, 2021.

Biden expressed the uniqueness of America, the idea of America: “You heard me say this before, again and again. I’m going to keep saying it. What’s that idea. We don’t derive our rights from the government. We possess them because we’re born. Period. And we yield them to a government.”

What does yield mean? It means to relinquish possession of. I guess for Biden, the difference between America and other countries is that we are born with inalienable rights but at birth we yield these inalienable rights to the government. I guess he believes that in other countries people are not born with inalienable rights so never enjoyed that brief moment at birth when we possess for a fleeting moment our inalienable rights before yielding them.

I wonder how I yielded my inalienable rights? Did my parents yield them when signing my birth certificate? Did I yield them voluntarily? Did I consent to yielding them? Were they not really yielded but taken by force? I personally do not recall yielding my rights.

Or does this represent his construction of the Constitution and the Bill Of Rights.

James Madison, the main author of the Constitution informed us that we have rights in our property and property in our rights. That we own our rights. That we own our property.

Jefferson in correspondence wrote: “Nothing… is unchangeable but the inherent and unalienable rights of man.” Further: “Of liberty I would say that, in the whole plenitude of its extent, it is unobstructed action according to our will. But rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add ‘within the limits of the law,’ because law is often but the tyrant’s will, and always so when it violates the right of an individual.”

To my knowledge, Biden has not retracted his words or made any claim that his words were a misstatement.

I have asked my father if he yielded my rights upon my birth via parental authority. Did my parents yield, cede, surrender all my inalienable rights at birth? Did all of your parents do the same?

Maybe when we emerge, we are immediately asked if we yield our rights and our utterances are taken as consent?

So now we know explicitly that our President’s view is that we all have yielded all our rights to him. I guess Biden feels other countries have had servitude to government forced upon them and in America we were born free but voluntarily surrendered our freedom to government. That we are not free by choice. Maybe we tasted freedom at birth, didn’t like it and yielded it to government. That we have chosen by our own free will and consent indentured servitude to government.

I stand with Lysander Spooner: “A man’s natural rights are his own, against the whole world; and any infringement of them is equally a crime; whether committed by one man, or by millions; whether committed by one man, calling himself a robber, or by millions calling themselves a government.”

This article was originally featured at Jeffrey Wernick’s substack and is republished with permission.