You should indeed move somewhere better, especially barring circumstances that prevent that, but this doesn't change one's current situation.
Philosophical rights and their interpretations by courts are quite disconnected, with courts mostly choosing to not restrict themselves (surprise, surprise).
The whole US legal system has been bursting at the seams for quite some time based on this flawed idea that rights are axiomatic rather than universal qualifications, with technology and privately-owned commons forcing the issue. For example, a communications network shouldn't have the ability to censor based on the contents of messages (this is currently mostly taken care of by lesser statutes, and luckily it's also easily solvable with encryption).
Of course rights are axiomatic. Rights only exist in relation to society; if you had your own planet and were the only being thereon with any kind of conscious agency, then it would be meaningless to talk about rights because your only concern would be natural hazards. You don't have universal rights any more than there are platonic solids lurking in some invisible dimension; the rights you have are what you are capable of asserting, either as an individual or collectively through a legislature.
Seriously, if you want to be left alone you can go live in the woods like Theodore Kacyzinski (before he started mailing bombs to people, obviously). Why is it that you think these universal rights are objectively real and articulable, but you are so opposed to the institutions that people collectively invest with agency in order to protect those rights - constitutional government, the UN and so forth? Laws are the accumulation of mutual agreements, when you get down to it. If you hate courts so much, go live in a civil law country where statute prevails over all else and the courts are limited to mechanistic applications of that. From what I can see, you enjoy substantially greater freedom in a common-law jurisdiction like the US than you do in most civil law jurisdictions, which is one reason that people are not fleeing the US to live in Latin America.
No. By axiomatic, I mean viewed as a base level on which abstractions are built up from (primitive-based might be a better term). By universal qualifications, I mean applicable to situations based on their shape, rather than what abstractions they are built upon. "The content of speech shall not be considered when discriminating between members of the public" (or something like that, more formality is clearly needed).
For example, the primitive-based view of the right to free speech defends my ability to discuss whatever topic I'd like while in a public park (with the usual caveats about speech that incites actions). But if that public commons is sold to a private entity, those protections magically vanish and
I can be kicked out arbitrarily based on the contents of what I am saying, even though society continues to have the same relationship with the park. The internet is one such privately owned public commons; should an ISP be able to cancel my service based on what I posted on a message board?
The standard ways of addressing the above problems are private contracts or additional laws. Both create unbounded complexity that isn't understandable by the common person and thus contrary to the very idea of 'rights'.
PS It's funny that you call me out for hating on institutions, because I think am starting to come around to seeing the importance of them as a concept. I just think many 'respected' institutions are calcified and bankrupt, with their actual behavior very different from what they purport. (Hm. I wonder if this is why people cling to process ('democracy') as an institution - there's little else left.)
Look, I appreciate your sincerity but think you are really starting to eat your own tail here. The standard way of resolving the problems you describe is in fact to assume that rights are bundles of actionable interests and to compare the interests at stake in a conflict - such as the right of a private property owner to exercise control over a park vs the right of park visitors to express themselves. That comparison is often carried out using economic methods, where possible; obviously it's hard to quantify the utility of free speech to citizens, but many other kinds of rights can be quantified (and the disutility of restricting speech may be quantifiable if the the overall utility of allowing it is not).
> Look, I appreciate your sincerity but think you are really starting to eat your own tail here
Care to elaborate why? I'm not arguing because I think you're going to suddenly acquiesce, but because I'm trying to refine my own viewpoint.
I obviously can't quickly read the linked books to see what they're actually saying, but they clearly have their own set of philosophies. This is fine, but these philosophies are not beyond reproach.
And as to Arrow's theorem and the problems of procedural outcomes - that's precisely my point! You're the one coming from the viewpoint where we're all bound to an ever-growing system that possesses the mandate to regulate whatever is economically prudent. If a system is incapable of adequately taking into account the conflicting desires of its inhabitants, it should be decentralized so that everybody doesn't have to agree!
Basically, because you're assuming that you can identify universal rights and a procedure for reliably identifying them, which you think is going to free you from the implementation problems of axiomatic statements of rights. This is the legal equivalent to squaring the circle, and it has been argued that legal rules are likely as limited by Godel's theorem as any other formal system. Indeed, recognition of such procedural shortcomings is a big reason for the elevated role of the judiciary in common-law legal systems.
system that possesses the mandate to regulate whatever is economically prudent
I don't agree that it's necessarily ever expanding, but insofar as it involves regulating whatever is economically prudent then sure, because I'm a utilitarian. Of course, I only have limited foresight, so I support the democratic approach as a necessary evil although I'd rather a pure technocracy. As long as it produces a reasonable approximation of Pareto optimality, I'm OK with that. It's imperfect, of course, but at least it's a methodology.
[...] it should be decentralized so that everybody doesn't have to agree!
But it already is; living in the US gives you a choice between over 50 different legal systems, and that's only at the state level. Some of them provide exceedingly poor outcomes for their citizens IMHO, but there you go.
Philosophical rights and their interpretations by courts are quite disconnected, with courts mostly choosing to not restrict themselves (surprise, surprise).
The whole US legal system has been bursting at the seams for quite some time based on this flawed idea that rights are axiomatic rather than universal qualifications, with technology and privately-owned commons forcing the issue. For example, a communications network shouldn't have the ability to censor based on the contents of messages (this is currently mostly taken care of by lesser statutes, and luckily it's also easily solvable with encryption).