Leftists believe that people's rights come from the government or from the Constitution. As such, they view rights not so much as rights but rather more as government-granted privileges.

Libertarians, on the other hand, believe that people's rights are endowed in them by nature and God and, therefore, that people's rights preexist government and the Constitution. We hold that the main purpose of government is to serve as our servant whose job is to protect the exercise of our natural, God-given rights. 

A good example of this leftist mindset was recently expressed in a fundraising letter I received from a leftist group called the Daily Kos. The letter stated that freedom of speech is "one of those rights granted to us in Bill of Rights." It went on to refer to "our First Amendment rights."

Not even the crafters of the Bill of Rights believed that. A careful reading of the First Amendment reveals that it doesn't purport to give any rights to anyone. Instead, the wording states that Congress (and implicitly the rest of the federal government) is prohibited from infringing on people's right of free speech. 

In other words, unlike American leftists today, our American ancestors didn't believe that people's rights come from the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, or from the government. They believed in what the Declaration of Independence stated — that man's rights come from nature and God and that it is the responsibility of government to protect, not destroy, the exercise of such rights.