Rights Are Freedoms, Not Powers

Foundation for Economic Education ^ | Aug 01, 1976 | Oscar W. Cooley

[Ray76]

The word "right," used as a noun, means, my dictionary tells me, a "just, or lawful claim." Claim on what? On whatever I want and can lawfully have.

I have a right to life, that is, a just claim on life. I have a right to liberty, a just claim to be free. I have a right to property, a just claim on land, goods, or other wealth.

My right is not life, liberty, property, but rather my proper and just claim upon these things. The distinction is important. It was understood by our revolutionary forefathers but is widely misunderstood today.

Jefferson, who asserted in the Declaration that all men have "certain unalienable rights," would have been disturbed if told that the government must provide food, clothing, and shelter to everyone because to have these is their right. One has a right to seek an adequate diet but not to compel his fellowmen to give it to him.

[Here] we encounter the assumption that a right is not a mere freedom to do a certain thing but is the privilege of compelling others to implement the doing of it. If this were true, a right would not be a freedom but a power.

[TChad]

For reading later.

[Pontiac]

Thanks for posting this.

It is a well written thought provoking article

[nathanbedford]

I agree that the article is well written but it is thought-provoking mainly because it has very little to do with the world 2014.

To suggest that an employer has the right to refrain from an employment contract as a property right simply flies in the face of legislation which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, sex, sexual persuasion, age etc. Likewise, a restauranteur has no similar property rights, nor does anyone in a place of public accommodation. A landlord of a multifamily dwelling has no such right. The list goes on and on.

Much of this legislation was put in place a decade before this article was written in 1976 but it has certainly been expanded in every decade since then.

If one looks at the loss of liberty, rather than the social value inherent in doing away with discrimination, one begins to understand why Barry Goldwater voted against the Civil Rights Act. To Barry Goldwater these rights were imperishable but to the progressives they were mere obstacles.

[CharlesOConnell]

A strain of thought from the end-stage of civilization, partially disconnected from the best wisdom of the past. A conception of rights and powers disconnected from foundational considerations of community and commonweal. Hemmingway lauded the murderous Spanish Republicans with Donne’s poetic phrases beginning with “No man is an island”. Radically individual freedom of the sexual-leftist variety is more closely related with the libertarian conception of freedom, disconnected from the core understanding of freedom, not as the ability to do what one wills, but freedom from compulsion to do ill: Freedom is the ability to do what one ought, for self, family, community, nation and world.

[Jacquerie]

The word for corrupted liberty is license. It is license which the Left promotes, for like everything else the Left does, it undermines civil society.

Our Framers back then, and most Americans today support ordered liberty enforced by societal norms and proscriptions.

[PoloSec]

We have the Right, yea the Responsibility to overthrow a corrupt government, we exercise neither and in so doing render them worthless.