Law: Wise politicians will be cautious about fettering the government with restrictions that cannot be observed, because they know that every break of the fundamental laws, though dictated by necessity, impairs that sacred reverence which ought to be maintained in the breast of rulers towards the constitution of a country. - Alexander Hamilton, Federalist #25, 1787
Laws of Nature: To grant that there is a supreme intelligence who rules the world and has established laws to regulate the actions of his creatures; and still to assert that man, in a state of nature, may be considered as perfectly free from all restraints of law and government, appears to a common understanding altogether irreconcilable. Good and wise men, in all ages, have embraced a very dissimilar theory. They have supposed that the deity, from the relations we stand in to himself and to each other, has constituted an eternal and immutable law, which is indispensably obligatory upon all mankind, prior to any human institution whatever. This is what is called the law of nature....Upon this law depend the natural rights of mankind. - Alexander Hamilton, The Farmer Refuted, 1775
On the law, Hamilton is dead-to-rights correct in that, while its' easy for elected officials to add duties for the government to perform (especially if not enumerated in the Constitution) it is very hard for government to dispense of them as Donald Trump is finding out first-hand. With regards to the laws of nature, Hamilton is also correct in that, here in America, our rights do not derive from the benevolence of government. They derive from our sovereign rights as human beings, rights given to us from our Creator. Government's function is not to restrict them willy-nilly but to protect them at whatever cost.
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