&gt; You can&#x27;t write a Constitution like the United States&#x27;, without natural rights.<p>Sure you can.<p>&gt; The most basic question in any government is &quot;who has the right to rule&quot;?<p>I don&#x27;t think that&#x27;s true. I think that you are assuming a framework of natural rights to make this statement, which is a circular argument.<p>&gt; The very first line of the Constitution establishes that it is the people who hold that right in the U.S., which means they have some sort of natural rights.<p>Alternatively, the first line of the Constitution acknowledges the empirical fact that government is simply that which people treat as legitimate authority, and therefore, <i>independent of any notion of right</i>, the people have an inherent <i>power</i> to govern and choose their government, as any government that the people do not choose to treat as such <i>cannot</i> government, and anything that the people choose to treat as a government <i>can</i> govern, whether or not one assumes any mystical notion of pre-legal &quot;rights&quot;.<p>Now, I suppose you could call this inherent, immutable power a &quot;natural right&quot; -- it is a real thing that really exists -- but, if so, its fundamentally different than all the other things that people hold out as &quot;natural rights&quot;, which are <i>not</i> inherent, immutable powers, but instead are simply preferences for the conduct of relations between persons (including persons acting through or on behalf of &quot;governments&quot;), rendering the whole field a morass of equivocation.