 The Netflix series The Last Kingdom is into its fourth season. Set in late 9th century England, the story is largely fiction, but it does make use of a certain amount of historical accuracy. It's a good show if you're into Saxons fighting Viking Danes, but what's most interesting about the show isn't the set dressing, battle scenes, or court intrigue. It's how awful life is for everyone, especially the common people. They're all scrabbling to stay one step ahead of starvation and disease, all while knowing that at any point anyone, a marauding foreign invader, your local lord, or even your own neighbor can take anything and everything from you with little to no recourse available. The only ways to gain wealth are theft and violence. If you want land or silver you have to take it. What few legal safeguards do exist are implemented by a corrupt and avaricious religious bureaucracy that doesn't hesitate to wield people's faith like a weapon. Slavery is commonplace and forget about equality under the law. In short, it shows us a world where there is no protection for individual rights or private property, not from warlords, brigands, or kings. But history shows us that the more robust and comprehensive those protections are in a society, the more peaceful and prosperous it is. With that in mind, join me for a brief tour of the history of individual rights on this short edition of Out of Frame. The philosophies and ideas that allowed the rapid progress and increased prosperity I discussed in our Game of Thrones episode simply didn't exist in the 9th century. The Magna Carta is still about 350 years away when the action in The Last Kingdom begins, but that was the first reasonably comprehensive written guarantee regarding individual rights and the restriction of power for kings and queens. It also established the implementation of due process for free men by saying no free man shall be arrested or imprisoned or deceased or outlawed or exiled or in any way victimized. Neither will we attack him or send anyone to attack him except by lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land. And even then, the Magna Carta only applied to nobility, not common people. It wasn't perfect, but it was only the beginning. The vast majority of humanity still struggled under repressive regimes. But as time passed after the signing of the Magna Carta, English common law began protecting more and more individual rights. The English Bill of Rights in 1689 formalized a lot of those precedents and included limited freedom of religion, a prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment, and the right to bear arms. Just as importantly, it further restricted the power of the king by requiring parliamentary approval for new laws. A century later, the English Bill of Rights had a strong influence on the American Bill of Rights. Both were based on the writings of John Locke and other Enlightenment philosophers who held the radical belief that everyone, regardless of station, had the fundamental right to life, liberty, and justly acquired property. And sure, America's founders had all kinds of flaws and failings. They didn't all live up to their stated ideals. But they created a system for protecting private property and individual rights by restraining the power of government. And that framework has been crucial for the expansion of civil liberties to historically neglected groups. The 13th amendment, which abolished slavery, was ratified in 1865. The 15th extended the right to vote to all men regardless of race. The 19th amendment granted voting rights to women. None of these amendments created new rights out of thin air. Instead, they just expanded the legal protection of life, liberty, and property to more and more groups of people. But even those amendments didn't guarantee equality. The universal demand for freedom eventually led to more social change, like the civil rights movement, desegregation, and the legalization of gay marriage. Even today, we're seeing a huge groundswell of support for criminal justice reform, especially as it relates to race. And yet, at the same time, there are a lot of threats to these ideas. In the US and many other parts of the world that have been expanding freedom for decades, we're seeing more and more opposition to free speech, effective property rights, and even due process. A surprising number of people want to see horrible ideas, like socialism and nationalist fascism return to prominence. And a lot of these people seem to be all too happy to use violence and destruction to get what they want. All this has compelled me to keep asking this question over and over, is this the world you want? The world I want is one where everyone's individual rights are defended and protected equally. The right to life, the right to liberty, the right to own property, including, most importantly, self-ownership. We've made incredible progress on this front in the last 800 years. But the fight isn't over. The brutal violence, grinding poverty, and general unpleasantness of life that we see on display in the last kingdom was only solved by limiting state power and adopting classically liberal philosophies that, at the time they were introduced, were downright radical, even heretical. The concepts of equality under the law, self-ownership, and the protection of property rights are the cornerstones of a free, open, and prosperous society. But they can only exist when governmental authority is kept in check, and when we all understand why these rights matter for everyone. Hey everybody, thanks for watching this episode of Out of Frame, and thanks especially to our patrons who helped us pick this topic. I hope you like what we did with it. Let me know what you think in the comments. If you're a fan of the show and want to help us choose the theme for our next short episode, follow the link in the description and join us on Patreon. And I've got a big announcement. We are finally developing an Out of Frame podcast. We've decided that we're going to talk about Starship Troopers for our first episode. Stay tuned for more details. And as always, be sure to like this video and subscribe to the channel, hit that bell icon, and look out for Out of Frame on Twitter and Instagram. Thanks for watching.