Outline

· We have Natural Rights which are a gift of God as articulated in the Declaration of Independence

· The three main rights usually asserted by our Founders are the rights to Life, Liberty, and Property (called the Pursuit of Happiness in the Declaration).

· Today, however, we hear people claiming other rights such as the right to Health Care

· Are these legitimate rights? Why or why not?

· Political philosophers have divided rights into two different categories – Negative rights and Positive rights.

· A negative right is a right in which no one else must do anything for us to keep these rights except to leave us alone.

· Negative rights put no coercive requirements on other people and are universal.

· Positive Rights are those that require someone else or some other entity to do something for you.

· It requires the coercion of others (usually from the State) to get them to do something for you.

· A positive right is not universal to everyone, by definition, because if others are coerced to do something for you, everyone couldn’t possibly have the same right.

· The so-called rights of Health Care, Living Wage, Education, and Abortion are examples of Positive Rights

· Positive rights are not legitimate because they involve coercion and taking away the rights of some as they are required to pay monetarily or physically for the needs or wants of others.

· Negative rights or Natural Rights are the only legitimate rights under God and under our form of government.

· The rights listed in Amendments 1 through 8 are just an extension of the rights of Life, Liberty, and Property from the Declaration.

· The Protection of Property Rights is vital to understanding how our rights interact.

· The so-called right of non-discrimination violates property rights.

· Our rights end where we trample on other peoples rights.

· Government becomes tyrannical when they interfere with property rights in the name of protecting other so-called rights.

Full Text

I want to discuss our Rights. As a refresher. The three main rights usually asserted by our Founders are the rights to Life, Liberty, and Property (called the Pursuit of Happiness in the Declaration). Today, however, we hear people claiming other rights such as the right to Health Care, the right to a Living Wage or Minimum wage, and even the right to have an abortion and more. What other rights have you heard asserted?

That begs the question, are these legitimate rights? Why or why not? The 9th Amendment clarifies that there are other rights not listed that are protected by the Constitution. It reads, “The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.” The Founders inserted this amendment to deal with the problem of partial enumeration of rights of the people. In other words, they felt they couldn’t possibly list all the natural rights of the people, but they didn’t want some future generations looking at the Bill of Rights and saying that those are the only rights we have.

So how do we decide which rights are legitimate?

To answer this question, we need to look at how political philosophers have divided rights into two different categories – Negative rights and Positive rights. Now before you jump to the conclusion that Negative Rights are bad and Positive Rights are good, let’s look at the definitions. Tom Woods, a Libertarian thinker

who has some great curriculum in his Liberty Classroom, defines Positive and Negative rights like this.

A negative right is a right in which no one else must do anything for us to keep these rights except to leave us alone. Take for example, our right to life. The only requirement from other people is to leave us alone and not try to kill us. Our right to liberty is similar; people only need to leave us alone for us to enjoy our right to liberty. Negative rights put no coercive requirements on other people. Negative rights are also universal. Everyone enjoys these same rights. What our Founders called Natural Rights given by God to everyone would fall into the category of Negative rights.

What then are Positive Rights? Positive Rights are those that require someone else or some other entity to do something for you. It requires the coercion of others (usually from the State) to get them to do something for you. It is also a right that is not universal to everyone, by definition, because if others are coerced to do something for you, everyone couldn’t possibly have the same right. Take for example the so-called right of Health Care. What do people mean when they say that? If they only meant that they have a right to spend their own money to purchase Health Care, that is a negative right because it is essentially the right of Property where we all have the right to spend our money the way we want. But is that what people mean? No, they mean that if they can’t afford Health Care, then someone else must provide it for them or they deserve free health care! Can you see the problem with this? Nothing is free, so if they are provided free or reduced-price health care then someone else must foot the bill, usually us as taxpayers. We must be forced to pay for something we don’t want or use through our taxes. Additionally, doctors or hospitals may be forced to give free or reduced-price care.

What about the right to a living wage or minimum wage? What if that person’s work is not worth the cost to a company of the minimum wage? The employer is forced/coerced into paying a higher wage than the employee is worth. Where does that money come from? Out of the company’s bottom line or in most cases higher prices to the consumer! What is the justness in that?

Even the so-called right to an abortion is a positive right. Why? Well, if it was just a kidney to be removed, the woman would have that right to do with her body

what she wants, because of the concept of self-ownership. We own our bodies because we are made in God’s image and no-one else should have the right of ownership over someone else’s body. However, with abortion, the baby, although inside the mother, is a human being from conception and deserves his or her right to life. The mother has no more right to “terminate” her pregnancy than she does killing her newborn or 2-year-old. A right to an abortion would require someone else, the baby, to give up its right, thus making it a Positive Right for the mother. The mother’s right ends where it infringes on the baby’s right to life.

So, you see that Positive rights are not legitimate because they involve coercion and taking away the rights of some as they are required to pay monetarily or physically for the needs or wants of others. Negative rights or Natural Rights are the only legitimate rights under God and under our form of government.

I want to continue our discussion of rights by bringing up a few instances where we have some confusion and bad legislation on our rights expressed in the Constitution. If you look at our Bill of Rights, you will see that the government is restricted from interfering with those rights listed in Amendments 1 through 8. Those rights are just an extension of the rights of Life, Liberty, and Property from the Declaration. Our right to free exercise of religion falls under the right of liberty. Our right to bear arms falls under the right of life since we have the right to defend ourselves to protect our life. That doesn’t give us the right to harm others with those weapons, in other than self-defense, because that would infringe on someone else’s right to life or liberty.

Most of the other restrictions on government listed in the bill of Rights fall under the right of property and that right of property is essential when we look at what is allowed or not allowed.

Let’s look at freedom of speech which falls under our right to Liberty. Some say that freedom of speech must have some limitations. You know that you can’t yell fire in a crowded theatre. So, is it right to say our freedom of speech is limited by some fuzzy rules about certain locations? It becomes very complicated when you look at it like that. But, if you think of it in terms of property rights, it clears up a lot of confusion. You can yell fire in your own house all you want but can’t in a theatre, why? Because you don’t own the theatre. The owner makes the rules and not yelling fire is a standard one. But if you just stood up and quoted

Shakespeare loudly in a theatre, you would also be kicked out. Why, because it is the owner’s rules which would include not allowing the disruption of the movie. Thus, we are not limiting free speech but protecting the right of property. No one would suppose you had the right to go into someone else’s house and harass the owner about your views on politics or whatever. Why? It’s his house and his property rights trump you right to free speech. Similarly, freedom of speech does not allow for slander and libel. Why not? Because again our rights to free speech end where we damage others’ rights. We don’t have the right to falsely claim something about someone because we are damaging his property, namely his good name, with false claims.

Of course, the most controversy centers around what happens on public property. Who owns that and who makes the decisions on the rules for them. For that we must rely on state and local laws. Unfortunately, most of the time the courts end up making rulings that are arbitrary or tyrannical instead of allowing the proper authority to make the rules.

I want to focus briefly on Federal Legislation and subsequent court rulings on one aspect of property rights. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and subsequent legislation has outlawed “discrimination” in the marketplace. The courts have added their own decisions that expand the idea of a right of non-discrimination to include racial quotas and such. Is non-discrimination a right? Think about it. It forces someone else to do something with his property he doesn’t want to do. It is definitely a positive right and therefore, I believe, it is not a legitimate right.

I will admit that the idea sounds good, but with most good ideas coming from the government there are always unintended consequences. To say that businesses can’t discriminate is absurd. Every business decision is an act of discrimination in some form or fashion. What Congress and the courts have done is create a positive right for some to be able to enter a person’s or company’s private property by coercion or force a business to hire or not fire someone by coercion. I will also admit that the days of “Whites only” was morally wrong. But in my opinion, it is also morally wrong for the government to coerce through law what someone must do with his own business. That violates the right of property. A better solution would be to let the free market work. Those that understood the

immorality of a “whites only” policy would boycott the business and eventually that business would go under or change their policies.

We can see all the problems that have been created by this concept of non-discrimination when we see Christian businesses sued for discrimination because they don’t want to violate their conscience by catering a homosexual wedding or something similar. The power of the state becomes almost unlimited when they can flagrantly violate the rights of property. If I own a construction company and through experience know that men make better construction managers than women, why should I get sued and forced to hire a woman just because she thinks she is being discriminated against? Can you see the violation of property rights in that? The owner should be able to make his own decisions and not be coerced to make decisions he wouldn’t choose otherwise.

The bottom line is that government should not have that much power to control anything and everything about the market under the misguided notion that they are protecting rights. That is not a free market.

We can see that we have gone down the road of making illegitimate rights the norm. If we all understand the consequences of such thinking, we would demand a stop to them. I hope this lesson has given you some food for thought as to what real rights should be.