Today is April 15th, known as far as I am concerned as Confiscation Day. What is required of individuals on this day, by the coercion of the federal government, is to either file an income tax return (along with any additional taxes that were not confiscated during the prior year, plus penalties) or apply for an extension to file an income tax return.

This requirement to act in a specified way is enforced by force; the force of potential loss of liberty, and yes, perhaps even jail time for not complying. The upshot of this, in philosophical terms, is that your individual rights are consistently violated during the year with April 15th being merely the day upon which you are forced to acknowledge your violated rights.

So, what, exactly, are “individual rights?” When we speak about individual rights what is it we are actually talking about?

Well, Ayn Rand did all of us many favors not the least of which was to brilliantly elucidate on matters such as this.

As you read Ms Rand’s words, please consider your position relative to government (at all levels). The premise of the uniquely American idea as promoted and implemented by our Founding Fathers was that all government was subordinated to the individual. Those words carry with them profound meaning… please consider them very carefully, for the question to ask is who is subordinated to whom today?

A “right” is a moral principle defining and sanctioning a man’s freedom of action in a social context. There is only one fundamental right (all the others are its consequences or corollaries): a man’s right to his own life. Life is a process of self-sustaining and self-generated action; the right to life means the right to engage in self-sustaining and self-generated action—which means: the freedom to take all the actions required by the nature of a rational being for the support, the furtherance, the fulfillment and the enjoyment of his own life. (Such is the meaning of the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.)

The concept of a “right” pertains only to action—specifically, to freedom of action. It means freedom from physical compulsion, coercion or interference by other men.

Thus, for every individual, a right is the moral sanction of a positive—of his freedom to act on his own judgment, for his own goals, by his own voluntary, uncoerced choice. As to his neighbors, his rights impose no obligations on them except of a negative kind: to abstain from violating his rights.

The right to life is the source of all rights—and the right to property is their only implementation. Without property rights, no other rights are possible. Since man has to sustain his life by his own effort, the man who has no right to the product of his effort has no means to sustain his life. The man who produces while others dispose of his product, is a slave.

Bear in mind that the right to property is a right to action, like all the others: it is not the right to an object, but to the action and the consequences of producing or earning that object. It is not a guarantee that a man will earn any property, but only a guarantee that he will own it if he earns it. It is the right to gain, to keep, to use and to dispose of material values.

Ayn Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness, pp 93.