Do we have natural rights?

There's been a lot of talk recently, both locally and nationally, about what rights people have.  Can the government just take away rights?  Do we have natural rights? 

A natural right is "any right that exists by virtue of natural law".  Natural law is "a principle or body of laws considered as derived from nature, right reason, or religion and as ethically binding in human society".

So what does that mean?  It means you have rights simply because you are human and alive.  Two common examples of natural rights are the right to freedom of speech and the right to own property.  These are basic things we agree to as binding our society.  When we talk of other governments as being "oppressive" we refer to these natural rights as being what are oppressed.  We fundamentally understand the concept of natural inherent rights. 

Here's another example to show how fundamental and natural our rights are:  babies and toddlers.  If you've ever been in a restaurant with an active baby or a toddler, you understand that kids inherently know they have a natural right to free speech.  The same thing with an inherent right to own property.  Kids protect their stuff, the "this is mine" concept is something kids do without prompting.  In fact, we have to train kids to share, it's not an inherent action.  From the start of our lives we fundamentally understand the concept of natural inherent rights.

The alternative viewpoint to this is that the human mind invents these ideas of natural rights, and they aren't actually natural.  The main problem with that line of thinking is that we can see, as I provided examples above, that we do understand natural rights from the beginning of our lives, and that it took man to invent the idea that we don't have natural rights.

So why would people want to argue such a thing as not having natural rights?  It's about control and power.  There are people who want to move us to a different form of government than what this country was founded under who need us to not think that we have natural rights.  They need us to think that we get our rights not naturally, but from government.  By getting our rights from the government, they can have government with the power to say who has the right to do this or that, and also have the power to say what you cannot do.  This is total government control, and it goes directly against the freedom and liberty that our Constitution guarantees us.  This is Marxism, and it's current form in the US political system it is also called Progressivism.  Progressivism restricts our rights, conservatism preserves them. It gains power by giving people "free" things, and convinces them that it's the government alone who can provide for them.  They are wrong, and it's an evil notion to think that we do not have natural rights.

To quote Thomas Jefferson, "A government big enough to give you everything you want, is a government big enough to take away everything that you have."