The state does not always represent the majority of the people. How often do you get a majority govt? The state often serves in self interest at the expense of the masses.
Mali, you keep on mixing up the terms. A state is not always the same as the government.
Actually, most laws are what you can not do, rather than what you can do.
Not really. People's rights for instance do not say what you cannot do but rather what you have the right to do. Go through labor laws in Canada for instance. You may also look at the Canadian Constitution. Other such documents will be similar. Plenty of "you have the right to" in those.
In a centralized state, the lives of people pretty much belong to the government.
You may argue otherwise on some philosophical level, but by law they don't, and governments have been successfully sued if they caused a loss of life.
However, if a people are fundamentally against what their government is doing (ie starting a war), they should be allowed to burn the flag to show their unhappiness and not be punished for it.
Wouldn't burning of the images of the government officials be more appropriate? What you are suggesting is that we should actually give national symbols away to a bunch of thugs, allow them to own those symbols, and then burn them?
It's almost like locking up a car thief in your car and then pushing the car to the lake to punish the thief. Plain silly. May as well save the car, eh?