A Right or A Privilege
Is your ability to drive an automobile a right or is it a privilege?
Every state in the union will tell you it is a privilege-they are wrong!
Before the union began people drove all over the inhabited continent. They did so without license. They drove wagons, they drove carriages, they drove buggies, they drove vans; they were usually powered or drawn by horses, which they also drove, but the fact of the matter is that they drove. Simply changing the object driven did not change the right.
The Constitution of the United States of America is absent in any restriction of that right to drive.
It is controlled in no way.
The Ninth Amendment says, “The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.” The rights are retained-not for a day, not for a week, not for a month, but for perpetuity!
The Tenth Amendment says, “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”
I want you to pay close attention to the Tenth amendment especially the fourth from the last word. That word is a conjunction. It is a disjoined conjunction. As such, neither the States nor the people may exercise a power without the expressed consent of the other. The States are fairly static but the people-who are the people. Are they the people living in the late 1700s? No they are all the people-who are all the people? All the people are those already gone, those here today, and those yet to come. Look at the wording, “reserved”-not for a day, not for a week, not for a month, but forever! Unless you get a consensus from all the people (and you cannot because you do not have the right to vote away the rights of future generations and they are not here to cast their ballot) the rights go to perpetuity.
The States often point to the tenth amendment as the States Rights amendment. They could not be more mistaken. The tenth amendment is the States Obligations amendment. The States are obligated to protect the people (all the people) from overreaching government! Many would argue that the states build the roads therefore they have the “right” to control them. The states build roads from road use tax. This tax belongs to the people for the sole purpose of building roads-or at least it did until they began to bastardize the trust fund to force the people paying the use tax to subsidize those who do not. The roads belong to the people, and the States have the obligation to maintain them.
I run a medical billing service. In my line of work I spend a lot of time on the road moving from one practice to another, whether it is just checking up on an existing client or recruiting a new one. My lively-hood is dependent on driving. I have a right to work. I have a right to expect the things that are required for my work. To say it is a “privilege” to drive portends that I can be denied the right to earn my living. Certainly the founding fathers would have disagreed! None of them had driver licenses and they moved about freely.