Getting rights wrong
The concept of “rights” once had a clear meaning; under the influence of progressive thought that meaning has been purposely obscured.
For the American founders and the classical liberals who influenced them (and today’s conservatives and libertarians, heirs to that classical liberal tradition), human beings were endowed with “inalienable rights” by virtue of their humanity and prior to the establishment of government.
Within this context, government is brought into being to secure such rights and thereby move us from Thomas Hobbes’ partly metaphorical “state of nature” (“nasty, brutish and short”) to a world where our lives and property are protected from the transgressions of our neighbors.
The creation of government therefore solves the first theoretical challenge of politics through a “social contract” in which we agree to live according to the laws of the community in return for the security for ourselves and our rights that that community provides.
Alas, the solution to the second great problem—how to safeguard our rights against the same government we brought into being to protect them—has historically proven more daunting. As the founders were well aware, tyranny in various forms had been the common, dismal human experience, whether the tyrants in question were called kings, czars, emirs, sultans or emperors.
Thus, what was created at Philadelphia in 1787 would represent the most successful effort in history to strike a balance between a system of government that was sufficiently powerful to protect rights but not so powerful as to threaten them. “A nation of laws, not men” would be based upon a system of checks and balances to the benefit of freedom (defined as the exercise of rights).
Central to all this was the understanding that the state exists to protect rights, not grant them. And that government must be kept limited and constrained in various ways lest it become a threat to liberty (which is also why progressives who champion a powerful, activist government are fundamentally illiberal).
The essential point is that the exercise of liberal rights, including those codified in the first 10 amendments to our Constitution (speech, press, assembly, religion, etc.), imposes no costs on others and requires no subsidy by the state; rather, it is crucial that the state infringe upon them only with great justification and in accord with due process.
Contained within this conception of rights was also a necessary but often misunderstood right to “property.”
Lest we forget, the original Jeffersonian formulation was not “life, liberty, and happiness,” but, following the most important influence on the founders, John Locke, “life, liberty, and property.” And that such a conception of a right to “property” meant much more than simply material goods and satisfactions—to the contrary, it represented the cumulative consequences of the exercise of our other rights; more precisely, the opportunities that a free society allowed for individuals to utilize their talents, ambitions and judgment in securing happiness.
Property, then, was a composite expression of all other rights because it was the result of an individual’s exercise of them over the course of a lifetime. It included not just wealth but also the personal autonomy of a free person.
All of which directs our attention to the crucial distinction between traditional liberal rights and some of the more dubious ones championed by contemporary leftists masquerading as liberals.
A right to health care, housing, or education is morally compelling at first glance and always electorally enticing—who, after all, doesn’t want everyone to have such things, as well as laptop computers, a well-paid job, nice cars and paid vacations? But the catch is that such “positive” rights can come only by government provision. And that provision can, in turn, come only from government if government uses coercion to take the means of provision from others, thereby violating their rights (property) in the process.
Traditional rights like speech, religion and assembly are exercised with no infringement upon and independent of the rights of others; the positive rights asserted by socialists and their progressive cousins necessarily involve a zero-sum, government-managed process of rights redistribution.
When a right to housing is asserted, for instance, it can only be provided by the state if it takes housing, or at least the income (property) to purchase it, from other citizens; indeed, the idea that rights can be redistributed and dependent upon state subsidy is cancerous to the very concept of rights.
Thus, when politicians promise various benefits under the misleading banner of rights (the latest being a “living wage” and free college), they are, by definition, violating the rights of those who will be forced to pay for the promised benefits, as well as undermining our understanding of the nature and sources of rights.
Put differently, no proper understanding of rights would grant someone a right to the fruits of someone else’s labor.
Speech is free. So, too, is the right to worship as one pleases. But nothing government provides is. Because there is no free lunch, there can’t be a right to one, either.
Indeed, the monstrous state necessary to guarantee that all receive the necessities of life “according to need” must always destroy genuine rights and individual liberty.