Wrong Rights

"I think that when statesmen forsake their own private conscience for the sake of their public duties, they lead their country by a short route to chaos."
--Sir Thomas More (A Man For All Seasons)

Some people in this country believe that they have claim on certain goods and services (e.g., food, shelter, jobs--or at least an income, and, now, healthcare) even if they do not acquire these things via productive work and exchange. They rely on political means--on government--to coercively take property from others and redistribute it accordingly.

Supporters justify this approach as providing for 'basic human rights.'

Over the past few centuries thinkers like John Locke and Frederic Bastiat have reasoned that the natural rights of people cannot include the redistribution of property by government. One problem involves deciding just how much wealth to appropriate from one individual and give to another. Perhaps more importantly, once government gets into the wealth distribution business, the historic tendency is for government to consolidate power and suppress individual liberty.

Instead, these thinkers have argued that the redistribution of wealth by government actually violates the few basic rights that endow the human condition. What are these rights? Most fundamental is the right to life. Murder, for example, violates an individual's most fundamental right to live. But so is incarcerating an individual who refuses to comply with government's wealth redistribution scheme. A 10 year jail sentence for such an act subtracts that much from an individual's productive life.

Second, an individual has a right to his/her own productive capacity. These are the talents, skills, and work choices that enable an individual to produce and create wealth. An individual is free to direct personal productive capacity as he/she sees fit. No one else has claim. Mandatory schooling, for example, that seeks to impose a particular skill set or work approach on an individual violates this basic right. Moreover, when an individual must toil months out of each year to produce output that will be confiscated and given to others, that individual is effectively enslaved to others for that period of time.

Finally, an individual has a right to the property earned from their productive labor and exchange. Confiscation of this wealth violates an individual's property rights.

When these three rights are respected, then an individual is free.

Government's proper role is to protect these rights. When another infringes on these rights in a manner that an individual cannot defend for him/herself, then government intervenes on the defendent's behalf. Such defines the appropriate scope of 'the law.'

Guilt for property rights violatations does not rest with government alone. Indeed, bureaucrats can be viewed as 'hired guns'--the agents of people who require strong arms to pry property away from rightful owners' and deliver it into the hands of the sponsoring thieves.