Rights are a formal codification of human freedom.
Rights are a specification of human freedom within societies.
Rights state explicitly the fact that no other person or institution has rightful jurisdiction over the person or property of another.
“Any State interference in private affairs, where there is no immediate reference to violence done to individual rights, should be absolutely condemned” (Wilhelm von Humboldt, The Limits of State Action, 1852).
What Wilhelm von Humboldt describes is sometimes referred to as “negative liberties”—or “negative rights”—so named because the only obligation it imposes upon others is of a “negative” kind: each person must abstain from infringing upon the equal rights of others.
Justice is nothing more or less than the legal recognition of each and every individual’s right to her own life and her own property.
The Oxford Dictionary defines the term rights as, in part, “A justifiable claim, on legal or moral grounds, to have or obtain something, or to act in a certain manner.”
Freedom is the absence of compulsion.
The primary thing that distinguishes the free person from the unfree person is voluntary action versus action that is compelled.
Compulsory taxation, for instance, means that you are not free to do whatever you wish with your own money, because the government may at any time legally compel you to give to government any amount it specifies.
Voluntary action hinges upon the principle of individual rights:
Are we each free to live as we choose, provided we do not infringe upon the equal rights of others?
Or not?
The most fundamental political question is this: Do we rightfully own ourselves, or do others rightfully have jurisdiction over us?
To ask that question is, I believe, to answer it.
At root, there is only one way to infringe upon another’s rights, and that is through the instigation of force. Quoting the 19th century political philospher Auberon Herbert:
Nobody has the moral right to seek his own advantage by force. That is the one unalterable, inviolable condition of a true society. Whether we are many, or whether we are few, we must learn only to use the weapons of reason, discussion, and persuasion…. As long as men are willing to make use of force for their own ends, or to make use of fraud, which is only force in disguise, wearing a mask, and evading our consent, just as force with violence openly disregards it—so long we must use force to restrain force. That is the one and only one right employment of force … force in the defense of the plain simple rights of property, public or private, in a world, of all the rights of self-ownership—force used defensively against force used aggressively (Auberon Herbert, The Principles of Voluntaryism, 1897).
As Auberon Herbert notes, force can be direct, as in assault and rape, or indirect, as in fraud or extortion. There’s no other way to breach rights than through the (direct or indirect) instigation of force.
Laws that restrict freedom of production and trade (such as prohibitions on interstate commerce) are an indirect use of force.
Trade tariffs are an indirect use of force.
Military conscription is a direct use of force.
Compulsory education is a direct use of force.
Rights, I repeat, are a formal codification of human freedom. This of course includes the freedom to trade—or, as Adam Smith phrased it, “to truck, barter, and exchange.”
Rights are ethical principles, and they are political principles. As such, rights specify human freedom in large groups.
This latter thing is emphasized because rights would not need to be discovered if you lived alone, or even if you lived in a small and insular society.
Rights derive from three things: human individuation, human society, and the power of choice which gives rise to moral agency.
Rights are discoveries, not inventions.
One proof of this is found in the fact that the only alternative to acting by right is acting by permission. Whose permission?
Answering that question is where you’ll begin to glimpse the true nature of rights: if humans only act by permission, who gives permission to those whose permission the rest of us are acting under? And who gives permission to those above, and so on?
Answer: no one—because rights are inalienable in the literal sense of the word: they are not granted, and they cannot be revoked, transferred, or made alien.
Rights are either recognized or they aren’t.
If they aren’t recognized, an injustice has been committed.
In the final analysis, there is ultimately only one right, and that is the right to your own life. All others—from free speech, to liberty, to property, to the pursuit of happiness—they are all an extension of that one.
Those who hold that life is valuable, hold, by implication, that men ought not to be prevented from carrying on life-sustaining activities. In other words, if it is said to be ‘right’ that they should carry them on, then, by permutation, we get the assertion that they ‘have a right’ to carry them on. Clearly the conception of ‘natural rights’ originates in recognition of the truth that if life is justifiable, there must be a justification for the performance of acts essential to its preservation; and, therefore, a justification for those liberties and claims which make such acts possible (Herbert Spencer, The Man Versus the State, 1884).
The crux of freedom is rights.
The crux of rights is human individuation and moral agency.
A deep connection exists between the right to life and the right to property. The importance of this connection cannot be overstated, yet it is precisely this connection that the leftwing and rightwing are both equally ignorant of.
Quoting the French economist Claude Frédéric Bastiat:
Each of us has a natural right to defend his person, his liberty, and his property. These are the three basic requirements of life, and the preservation of any one of them is completely dependent upon the preservation of the other two. For what are our faculties but the extension of our individuality? And what is property but an extension of our faculties? … Man can live and satisfy his wants only by ceaseless labor, and by the ceaseless application of his faculties to natural resources. This process is property (Claude Frédéric Bastiat,The Law, 1848).
Property is “not only money and other tangible things of value, but also includes any intangible right considered as a source or element of income or wealth. The right and interest which a man has in lands and chattels to the exclusion of others. It is the right to enjoy and to dispose of certain things in the most absolute manner as he pleases” (The Electric Law Library).
That identifies precisely why the locus of freedom and free-exchange is found in private property. Property, as even Karl Marx understood, is most fundamentally of all the right to a type human action: to get, maintain, use, and dispose.
This helps explain why environmentalism, as all other forms of socialism, is inherently anti-freedom.
The reason that laissez faire is the proper social system is not because it “works best,” as many nominal defenders of free markets often phrase it. Laissez faire is proper, rather, because it is just. Laissez-faire is the only economic system that respects and protects the inalienable right to life, liberty, property, and free exchange.
One must never forget: money is property. Money is the symbol of your labor.
The root of real wealth is production.
Compulsory (as opposed to voluntary) taxation is a breach of property rights.
Individual rights and the principles behind these rights have been under siege since the moment they were first brought into the light. Yet they’ve remained remarkably resilient, and they will continue to do so. The reason they’ve remained resilient is that they are in a certain sense self-evident: we each “have a property in our own person.”
That is the fundamental principle behind rights, and property is an extension of person, nothing more and nothing less.
If you believe in human freedom, you believe by extension in the freedom to exchange and trade—fully—because if humans are not allowed to trade freely, humans cannot be described as truly free.
No freedom or justice can exist if rights, including property rights, do not exist.
The very word rights has its origins in ancient Roman law and is related to the Roman word jus, as in justice. According to historian J. Stuart Jackson, jus “is wider than that of positive law laid down by authority, and denotes an order morally binding on the members of the community.” In the Roman sense of the word, “right” meant “what is just.”
Rights formally warrant all holders to certain freedoms—specifically, the freedom to act in a certain way. Please take note of the phrase “freedom to act.” It is an important part of the definition, since rights do not assure anyone of anything except the freedom to try, and also the fact that if you succeed, the fruits of your success are yours inalienably.
What, though, is the fundamental stuff of rights? Of what rough material made?
It’s important to note that rights are not primaries: they are second-order principles that derive from something deeper. That something is a thing specific and unique to the human condition. It is the faculty of choice.
If human behavior were purely instinctive and automatic, as it is with animals, there would be no question of rights because any action we undertook would not be chosen. Human action would be neither moral nor immoral but amoral, and rights would therefore not exist.
The grizzly bear who mauls the innocent child is not evil. The man who mauls the innocent child is.
The material from which rights are made is the material of the human mind, which operates by means of reason, which is a volitional apparatus, a conceptual apparatus, and which is the uniquely human method of maintaining life and flourishing.
Thus rights form the logical link—a link of causality—between ethics and politics. Which is why Herbert Spencer and similar freethinkers regarded rights as “politico-ethical precepts.”
Quoting Samuel Adams:
Among the natural rights are these: First a right to life, secondly to liberty, thirdly to property. Together with the right to defend them in the best manner they can…. Rights are evident branches of, rather than deductions from, the duty of self-preservation, commonly called the first law of nature.
Rights are another of these things that everyone thinks she understands, but which in fact almost nobody does, the principles undergirding rights deeply philosophical and complex.
To get some idea of how poorly understood the nature of rights is, one need look no further than the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights and observe the sheer number of times one would have to breach the rights (usually in the form of property expropriation—i.e.: “Everyone has the right to rest and leisure, including reasonable limitation of working hours and periodic holidays with pay”) of some individual somewhere to achieve even a fraction of that Declaration’s stated goals. These are usually known as “positive rights.” Positive rights don’t actually exist.
Positive rights are a government confabulation.
Only negative rights exist: the only duty or obligation, I repeat, that negative rights impose upon others is of a negative type — i.e. we must abstain from violating the same rights in others. By definition, “positive rights” require the violation of actual rights since in order to implement them, you must expropriate without consent.
Positive rights (so-called) require the instigation of force. By definition—by their very nature—“positive rights” require force.
Leftwingers tell us we have the right to healthcare, the right to a job, the right to a smoke-free work environment, the right to a certain wage, and so on, whereas rightwingers say we do not have the right to open our liquor stores on Sunday, neither the right to consensual sex (with any other consenting adult, whether money is exchanged or not), nor the right to gamble, and so on.
Despite what you’ve been told, these views are not polarized. They’re variations of a theme, and their common denominator is this: Humans do not possess the inalienable right to their own life and property, and government bureaucrats are better suited than we ourselves in determining how we should conduct our lives and our business.
Yet there is nothing—absolutely nothing—in nature, neither human nature nor nature apart from humans, that gives government bureaucrats legitimate authority over the person or property of any other human being.
To say that we have the “right to healthcare,” or the “right to a job,” or the “right to a smoke-free work environment” is the same as saying we have the right to the life, labor, and property of another, which we do not and cannot—by virtue of what rights are.
Rights by definition preclude any claim to the person and property of another, even if that person is a doctor. This is what is meant by the old-fashioned yet completely accurate terminology that described rights as “compossible.”
Rights are compossible.
Compossibility is one of the defining characteristics of rights.
To say that humans do not have the right to open their liquor stores on Sunday if they choose, or to say that humans do not have the right to have consensual sex with another consenting adult if they both choose, or to say that humans do not have the right to gamble and use drugs if they choose, is the same as saying your life is not yours by right but belongs in some measure to bureaucrats, and that humans to that extent exist only by the permission of those bureaucrats—this in spite of the fact that no government and no governmental bureaucracy and no bureaucrats or politician in the history of the humanity has ever proved itself more capable of running each individual’s life better than the individuals themselves.
Government compulsion, rightwing or left, is the antithesis of individual rights.
There are no such things as “collective rights,” not in any variation, just as there are not “white rights,” “black rights,” “gay rights,” “women’s rights,” or anything of the sort. There are only rights.
Rights, by definition, can only belong to individuals—specifically, the individuals who make up any “collective”—and any attempt to subvert this becomes, also by definition, a form of tribal-collectivism.
That is why even the term “individual rights” is pleonastic in the ultimate purport—though perhaps necessarily so, given how poorly understood the principle of rights is: it’s pleonastic because the very definition of the word rights presupposes individual, since it is only individuals who possess rights.
Quoting the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises, in his description of the principle of individualism, from his book Human Action:
First we must realize that all actions are performed by individuals. If we scrutinize the meaning of the various actions performed by individuals we must necessarily learn everything about the actions of the collective whole. For a social collective has no existence and reality outside of the individual members’ actions.
And the economist George Reisman, who is echoing Ludwig von Mises, his former teacher:
Only individuals exist; collectives consist of nothing but individuals. Only the individual thinks; only the individual acts…. All rights are rights of individuals.
The individualistic method — or methodological individualism, if you prefer — does not, however, claim that only individual human beings are real and that social phenomena do not exist. It holds, rather, that each individual human being is alone able to think, feel, and act.
Methodological individualism rests upon the principle that the relevant object of political and ethical inquiry are the individual human beings in question, as distinguished from a society, race, class, sex, or any other group. Quoting Karl Popper:
“Social phenomena] should always be understood as resulting from the decisions, actions, attitudes, etc. of human individuals, and we should never be satisfied by an explanation in terms of so-called ‘collectives’ (states, nations, races, etc.).”
The reason this principle is so critical to ground in the facts which give rise to it (and to thereafter deeply defend) is this: any other view of humanity — which is to say, any view that doesn’t recognize the individual as the proper standard by which societies are gauged and maintained — results in command and control: other humans, purveyors of force, seizing control over other individual human lives.
As it happens, there exists an absolute and foolproof method for determining if something is a right or not:
Your rights, my rights, everyone’s rights stop where another’s begin.
If you follow that simple principle, and if you remember that property is nothing more than an extension of person, and that money is also property, you’ll never confuse the issue of rights.