Justice & Law Quote by Michael Badnarik

The line is a political crowbar: simple enough to chant, sharp enough to split a coalition. Badnarik is flattening a messy civic argument into a hard libertarian premise: rights attach to human beings, not to abstractions like “the community,” “the nation,” or “the public.” It’s designed to short-circuit the most common justificatory move in modern politics - the appeal to collective need as a blank check for coercion.

The intent is defensive and prosecutorial at once. Defensive, because it treats the individual as the last legitimate unit of moral standing, especially against majoritarian pressure. Prosecutorial, because it implies that when leaders invoke “community rights,” they’re laundering power through a feel-good noun. The community becomes a ventriloquist’s dummy; the state speaks, and dissenters are told they’re harming “us.”

Subtext: rights talk isn’t neutral; it’s a map of who gets to make demands. If only individuals have rights, then policies justified by collective entitlement - zoning that excludes, speech codes framed as “community standards,” eminent domain for “public benefit,” even certain public health mandates - start to look suspect by default. It’s a worldview that prefers consent to solidarity, contract to obligation.

Context matters because Badnarik is a Libertarian-era figure reacting to an early-2000s political climate where “the common good” was frequently invoked to expand surveillance, policing, and executive authority. The quote also quietly sidesteps a thorny counterpoint: communities don’t have rights, but they do have institutions, and institutions set terms of belonging. Badnarik’s sentence works because it’s rhetorically clean, not because the world is.