re: The Law by Frédéric Bastiat

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any number of things.

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Those are the rights that seem to allude your comprehension.

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Without authority, how would the concept of rights be conceived. Authority exists without rights, but rights cannot even be conceptualized, but against the backdrop of Authority. Nobody thought they had a right to something, until their access to it was threatened by authority.

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Yes, people don't often formulate 'I have a right to X' until X is threatened, but that's an epistemic claim about when humans notice things, not an ontological claim about what makes the claim true. Nobody thinks about gravity until they fall, but that doesn't mean gravity didn't exist before they fell.

Further, as I've already articulated, if rights are just whatever authority grants, then authority can never be tyrannical - it's just authority doing authority things. There's no standard left to call any law unjust. That's not a minor cost. That's giving up the ability to fight tyranny at all.

Authority can certainly exist without rights being formally recognized, but that's different from rights not existing. A slave whose freedom is denied still had a claim being violated; the absence of legal recognition doesn't retroactively mean there was nothing there to violate.

Your trick is to slide between two different things calling them both 'authority.' Sometimes you mean raw power (just the capacity to enforce, to threaten, to take), next you use it to mean legitimate authority, power that's justified, that people owe compliance to rather than just submit to out of fear.

That distinction is the whole ballgame. A mugger has power over you but he doesn't have authority over you. If 'laws are the framework of authority,' you need to explain what makes that authority legitimate rather than just powerful, and you can't appeal to the law itself for that, or you're arguing in a circle: the law is legitimate because it's the law. OK, but then why is the law legitimate?

This is exactly my point - Rights are one of the standard ways we distinguish legitimate authority from mere power. Strip that out, and 'authority' just means 'whoever currently has the guns', which makes your 'framework of authority' much less impressive than you think.