Tag: Rights

NO

Experimental artist and writer Boyd Rice is often identified as a social darwinist or fascist. His recent collection, NO, with short entries on various subjects resists such simplistic feel-good accusations. If there is one common thread in this collection, it is his attempt to describe reality as it is, regardless of what people would like it to be. Like Jim Goad, he often takes aim at the self-congratulatory and delusional progressive underground culture and the empty rhetoric that masks the will to power:

If a despotic form of rule wanted to keep its populace in line, only the most foolish regime would tell its people: “Do as we say, or you’ll be punished.” No, the surest way is to inform them they’re free and equal. That they are all unique individuals.

On the idea that we have “rights”:

If rights are an inalienable bestowal upon us by the Creator, how could we be deprived of of them either by men or courts? Unless, of course, they are as much an abstraction as any of the other pillars of our contemporary consciousness, such as equality, individuality, or what have -have-you.

He has little patience for the “Dreadlocks sporting young “anarchist” who lives in his parent’s home in the suburbs”, “calls police fascists”, and thinks we are living in a “police state”:

Some fear the coming of a new police state. If so, current trends don’t portend such a situation. Quite the inverse, in fact. If things proceed along their current path, there may be exponentially more laws, none of which will ever be enforced to any meaningful extent.

As a matter of fact, the transformative nature of politics is greatly exaggerated by political junkies, left and right:

Those on either side of the fence are precisely similar in their almost childlike optimism about the political process, in their faith that it has the power to transfigure both our nation and our lives…Foolhardy men wish to change the world , as a precondition to changing their lives…Any attempt at exercising  control over the world is an exercise in futility. Exercising control over ones life is the simplest of matters. And the results it yields are both immediate and demonstrable.

Boyd Rice writes that “perhaps the rarest individual is one that is genuinely apolitical.”

NO is currently sold out but an expanded edition is forthcoming.

Anything that’s peaceful

Libertarians spend a non-trivial amount of time arguing for the obvious. At best, such arguments are redundant because there is no widespread believe that violence or threats of violence are a good thing. At worst, these debates hurt the prospects for a society with less violence because theories about the existence of  “natural rights” are rightly a source of  ridicule. The idea that “rights” just exist out there in the world without actual individuals engaging in contracts to establish rights is not going to persuade anyone with a sober mind.  In that sense, Ayn Rand, Murray Rothbard and the (early) Robert Nozick did not do the renaissance of classical liberalism a favor.

A similar problem is encountered with terms like “liberty” and “freedom.” There have been extensive debates about the meaning of liberty as if there is a God-given “real” meaning of the word that just lies out there waiting to be discovered. Many libertarians would argue that we should seek a free society. But as Anthony de Jasay has noted, “The question of whether freedom is valuable or a free society is good ought not to enter at all into a properly thought-out political doctrine, liberal or other. It should be resolutely ignored. Whichever way the question were answered would, it seems to me, inevitably steer us in a teleological direction, and undermine the foundations on which the society that we could consider free might stand and survive. ”

“Consequentialist” libertarians have rejected the emphasis of “moralist” libertarians on (absolute) rights and liberty and have argued for evaluating public policies in light of their consequences. Liberty founder R.W. Bradford (1947-2005) repeatedly held the moralist libertarians responsible for the poor acceptance of libertarianism.  But it is hard to see why conventional consequentialist libertarianism would do much better. Most people do not come into this world seeking to optimize some kind of social welfare function or overall efficiency. In this sense consequentialist libertarianism is even further removed from reality – a point that has been well recognized by former utilitarians like Jan Narveson.

A small minority of libertarians have hopes of reconciling egoism and libertarianism. These authors often spend considerable time making the case for ethical egoism. For people who tend to look at such questions from the perspective of empiricism and modern science such investigations are rather excessive. The interesting question is not so much whether there are objective moral truths but what happens when people who have left such beliefs behind interact.  This question can be approached from a Hobbesian perspective or from an evolutionary perspective. But what often is discovered is a general desire to discourage and prohibit violence.

It is not likely that Ayn Rand and Murray Rothbard will be remembered for their breakthroughs in moral philosophy but what these authors have in common is their identification of classical liberalism with non-aggression. This re-conceptualization of classical liberalism has been an important breakthrough because it enables to see things like “regulation” and “public policy” in fairly non-ambiguous physical terms. If one strips away all the rhetoric about “rights” and “democracy” one is left with a State that mostly engages in violence and threats of violence against peaceful people. One of the major contributions of modern libertarians has been to show this is the case – even when the State only claims a  “monopoly on violence” to solve public goods problems.

Contra libertarians such as R.W. Bradford, the desire for peace is neither outdated nor ineffective. People may differ on the importance of “negative” or “positive” liberty or growing “the economy” but few people go out in public  speaking out in favor of violence against the innocent. The main task of libertarians is not to look for “justifications” or “foundations” but the demystifying of the State and the defense of anything that’s peaceful.

Theodore Dalrymple on rights and moral imagination

Writing for the Wall Street Journal, Theodore Dalrymple (Anthony Daniels) makes the following observation:

When the supposed right to health care is widely recognized, as in the United Kingdom, it tends to reduce moral imagination. Whenever I deny the existence of a right to health care to a Briton who asserts it, he replies, “So you think it is all right for people to be left to die in the street?”

When I then ask my interlocutor whether he can think of any reason why people should not be left to die in the street, other than that they have a right to health care, he is generally reduced to silence. He cannot think of one.

Dalrymple opens his piece by noting that “concrete benefits in pursuance of abstract rights, however, can be provided by the government only by constant coercion.” The obsession with “abstract rights” is not just confined to modern liberals and socialists. This kind of metaphysical thinking about rights is just as prevalent among libertarians and neoconservatives.

Health care as a right?

To understand the background of the recent debates on health care it is instructive to look at how this issue  is being approached in “progressive” states like Oregon. Last year a Constitutional Amendment was discussed  which would declare access to health care in Oregon to be a “fundamental right.” But what is so progressive about a proposal that increases the scope of collective decision making over individual choice?

We can think of a right as a contract between two people in which both parties have agreed to accept the obligations of the agreement because it provides them mutual benefit. Evidence that such rights and obligations exist can be found in a verbal or written agreement. For example, person A is obliged to pay person B a specific amount of money, and person B is obliged to deliver A the product before an agreed date. So far, so good.

But when we talk about health care as a constitutional right we no longer talk about rights in this sense. We talk about rights as the outcome of political decision making. Rights conceived in this fashion do not reflect actual agreement between individuals but political authority. This may not be necessarily problematic when the rights in question reflect the “common good,” but rights that generate massive entitlement programs do not reflect this kind of  consensus.

The right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” reflects the freedom of individuals to live their lives as they see fit. The only obligation these “rights”  impose on others is not to interfere. These obligations can be satisfied by doing nothing and we all have an interest in having such freedoms. Such universal agreement is not possible when we talk about a right to health care. The right to health care does not just mean that people have a right to obtain medical care, but that others have an obligation to supply it.  A right to health care will impose obligations that are far reaching in nature and inevitably lead to a state-run health care system where all people are equal in having no choice and health care is rationed by “experts.”

There are many things in life we think as desirable, perhaps even necessary. But from this it does not follow that other people have an obligation to supply these things. During the 20th century there has been an increasing tendency to claim everything we desire in life as a “right.” This does not just undermine the ideal of having a government that serves the common good, it also produces a society where mutual assistance, charity, and self-reliance are increasingly undermined. The movement to make health care a constitutional right reflects a cynical view of the purpose of a Constitution. Instead of protecting fundamental freedoms that all citizens will recognize as just, the Constitution is used to secure greater protection for partisan political issues.

It is guaranteed that a constitutional right to health care will not come about without a political struggle. This itself is indicative that such a right is the outcome of non-unanimous decision making (to put it mildly) and does not represent the common good. If we secure a right to health care this way, it will not reflect right but might. It should go without saying that “might makes right” is not a progressive but an authoritarian principle to organize society.  The situation is not much different in the case of current proposals to reform health care.  If any breakthroughs will be made it will be in the form of one coalition prevailing at the expense of others.

Curing “rights talk” with more “rights talk”

John Gray reviews Dominic Raab’s The Assault on Liberty: What went Wrong with Rights and makes an important observation:

Ironically, while he astutely criticizes the rise of a legalistic culture of rights, Raab seems to believe we can extricate ourselves from our present predicament through another exercise in legalism. Yet when much of the British political class no longer cares about freedom and barely understands what it means, a Bill of Rights can hardly be expected to turn the tide. It was not law or rights that Churchill invoked when dismantling wartime infringements of freedom. It was civilization, which requires a measured restraint in the use of power on the part of our rulers without which bills of rights are not much more than scraps of paper.

Classical liberals should not be surprised about the current proliferation of rights. As soon as the term right is divorced from actual contract, the road is cleared for all other kinds of rights claims. The challenge is to overcome the incoherent thinking about rights as such.