What Is a Right?

I’ve covered the definition of a right here and there. I think it’s essential knowledge if you’re going to achieve freedom, prosperity, and civilization, which is the goal here at the Spherical Model.

Bill of Rights in the US Constitution
image from the National Archives

In 2013 I wrote,

What is a right? Something you are entitled to just by virtue of being born a human. God has granted it to you. Others are required to respect your rights, but not to provide them out of thin air.

In the Economic Sphere section of the Spherical Model website, in the section called “How to Tell What Is a Right,” I offer this:

Let’s be clear on what a right is: it is not a privilege, something you might be granted under certain circumstances. It is something that you deserve simply for being human. You do not have to earn a right; you can’t rightfully be deprived of it (with possible forfeitures such as committing capital crimes). If it is a right, it does not come from government; it comes from God. Government may use its power to either guarantee a person’s rights, or to deprive a person of his rights. Restraint from depriving a person of his rights is not equivalent to granting rights. Rights simply do not come from government.

So, if something is a right, it is a person’s natural right whether there is a government entity guaranteeing it or not.

We’re born naked, impoverished, and inexperienced. It is by growth, hard work, and gaining in expertise that we try to overcome this condition throughout our life. We are born with the right to life, the right to live free (not enslaved), and the right to pursue our own path to overcome the naked impoverished state.

I came across an additional good source this weekend, reading Dr. Larry Arnn’s book The Founders' Key. He does a good—and fair—job of laying out both the definition of natural rights and the “progressive” definition of “positive rights,” as defined by FDR. And then explains why we should prefer the way natural rights are understood. He says,

The Founders thought that all our rights are connected. Our right to property is based on the same facts as our freedom of speech. Our right to the material things that we earn is founded in the same nature as our freedom to worship and pray as we please. Our civil and political rights depend on our ability to hold the means of our well-being in our own hands. We can have no rights of any kind that do not leave “to everyone else the like advantage.” This means that nothing properly called a right takes anything from anyone else. [p. 62]

The highlight is mine. I thought that was a main idea worth exploring.

Let’s look again at FDR’s list of “positive rights”:

In our day certain economic proofs have become accepted as self-evident: a second bill of rights, under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all, regardless of station or race or creed. Among these are:

·         the right to a useful and remunerative job, the right to earn enough to provide food and clothing and recreation;

·         the right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return that will give him and his family a decent living;

·         the right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom—freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad;

·         the right of every family to a decent home; the right to adequate medical care, and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health;

·         the right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age—sickness, medicine, and unemployment;

·         the right to a good education.

All of these rights spell security. And after this war is won, we must be prepared to move forward in the implementation of these rights to new goals of happiness and well being. For unless there is security here and home, there cannot be lasting peace in the world.

So, if you have the right to a “useful and remunerative job,” then you have the right to an employer to provide it. If there’s a free-market agreement between you and the employer, you both benefit. But if the employer is coerced to provide for you, regardless of your skill or success in bringing profit to the employer, the government must enslave the employer in order to provide you with that “right.”

If you have the right, as a farmer, to raise and grow whatever you want, regardless of market supply and demand, and receive a particular government-set rate of return—even in a season when crops fail and the farmer provides nothing of value to society—then someone is going to be coerced into giving that farmer his “rightful” share, regardless of whether the farmer provides value.

The right to trade in a free market is a good idea; a monopoly is not a free-market idea. There are sensible laws to prevent monopolies from keeping supply and demand from working. However, if a company innovates and creates something new, they aren’t required to also create a competitor. They simply put their product out there and compete when/if a competitor shows up. So that one depends on whether government does its policing role to protect free trade, or steps in to pick winners and losers, which ends up actually interfering with free trade.

If every family has a “right” to a “decent” home, who buys it for the family that can’t afford it? And who decides what “decent” means? If everyone has the “right” to adequate medical care, who is coerced to provide it or pay for it? And who decides what “adequate” means? And while it sounds nice to allow everyone the “opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health,” who decides what the opportunity consists of? If illness or disabilities are preventing that person from enjoying good health, who is required to intervene and see to it that the person doesn’t have to suffer? And how, if a solution is unknown?

If someone has the “right” to be free from financial worry in old age—whether or not they work and save, or have higher than normal health care costs because of inadequate self-care or just circumstances beyond their control—who must be coerced to provide for that person?

If a person has a “right” to a “good” education, shouldn’t teachers be providing that for free? Shouldn’t builders be building the necessary buildings for free? If so, who works for free to provide housing and food for the teachers and builders? And who gets to decide what qualifies as “good”?

While it sounds nice to “give” security to every citizen, a government isn’t God; and a government isn’t a wealth source. Government is power, and a cost. Everything government does is a cost to society. So anything it “provides” that costs money must be taken from someone who earned that money.

So let’s be clear: if government is “giving” us rights that we weren’t born with, government is coercing someone to work to provide for someone else it deems worthy. Government deprives Person A of his natural rights to life, liberty, and/or property in order to give the illusion it is providing the extra, “positive rights” for Person B. Whatever Person B feels, Person A rightly feels oppressed by that arrangement.

image found here

If we want people to have some basic shelter, food, health care, and education, there’s a way a free people can do that: charitable giving. Local charities and philanthropies are a lot better at identifying the best way to provide those things than governments can ever be. Then, a person decides when he can afford to offer from his surplus, and he can decide what conditions apply when he makes his donation.

We can do that with anything that is not a natural, God-given right, but is nice to have. We can accumulate enough to offer it freely to those who can’t manage to work their way out of their naked, impoverished, and inexperienced state. We can care about, and for, one another.

Government has no feelings. It is only coercion. That power should be limited to necessary protections of our life, liberty, and property.

Logical Leaping Leprechauns

image from here

There’s no purpose in having Leprechauns in the title, except that it is St. Patrick’s Day, and they are dangerous tricksters, with the promise of unearned prosperity that you never get.

I was reading the Outlook (opinion) section of Sunday’s Houston Chronicle, and started reading a piece, by a local physician, that at first struck me as way more conservative than I usually find in that section. Here’s the beginning:

   In high school, I had to memorize the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution. I did not understand why then, but I do now. This is essentially the mission statement for the United States. When I served on the U.S. Senate staff during the initial months of the health care reform debate in 2009, I thought that the Preamble should serve as a touchstone for proposed legislation. Given that health care reform legislation would affect every American and about one-sixth of the economy, it seemed prudent to return to first principles to justify such action.

   The Preamble begins by saying who wrote it and why. The government derives its power from the people. That power should be used continuously to improve the country that the Founders fought to free from foreign control. Establishing and preserving justice, peace, safety, well-being and liberty were all part of the role of the federal government. Implicit in the singling out of “our posterity” is the idea that this was to be a timeless arrangement that would protect us collectively and individually.

This is almost exactly right on track. We want people to do this—read the Constitution, recognize that mission statement in the Preamble, and limit government to its proper role.

But there’s a change he makes, which I didn’t catch until I read further (because I had failed to read the article title). Notice when he’s listing the roles of the federal government, he uses the term “well-being” instead of “general welfare.” He could mean the same thing I do, which I think is what the founders meant. But he doesn’t. I believe it means the federal government is limited to making laws that affect the population as a whole, rather than specific special states or groups. And those laws, according to the enumerated powers of the federal government, are designed to protect life, liberty, and property (and the freedom to pursue property/happiness as one chooses, rather than having government choose one’s profession).

 

So I was surprised at this very next passage in the op-ed: “How does the Preamble support health care for every American?” Um, it doesn’t. Health care is a service that can be purchased. Government’s job is to get out of the way of informed legal transactions. This is an odd question to follow the correct claim that the Preamble is the US government mission statement.

The leap of logic is revealed in the next paragraph:

That there is such inequity in the provision, access, cost and quality of health care in America is inconsistent with a just country.

So, to him, a “just country” is one in which no one can purchase more care than anyone else; they can all purchase exactly the same services regardless of resources. Social justice. Code for socialism.

That bit about “I understand the Constitution” was just a cover for “I think government’s role is really supplying everything we as a majority decide everyone ought to have.” This is FDR’s “positive rights” argument/fallacy. Commodities and services might be nice to have, but they aren’t rights. God gives us rights.

We’re born here naked, impoverished, and inexperienced. We spend our lives working our way out of that condition. But the only “entitlement” involved is the requirement that parents provide their children’s needs, teach them, and prepare them for self-sufficiency.

The government can’t “give” you a commodity or service without requiring a taxpayer to pay for it. Government isn’t allowed by the Constitution to provide any commodity, only services—and only those services that fit in the category of protecting your life (not allowing others to harm you), liberty (not allowing others to enslave you), and property (not allowing others to steal your property).

There’s nothing in there about providing “health care.” If health care were a right, then why would we pay doctors for it? They would have to provide it because it’s our right. But that would be enslaving the doctors, who should be justly compensated for their skilled services. So, in order not to enslave doctors, the government would have to pay them—and the government only gets money by taking it from taxpayers. So the taxpayers would be enslaved (forced to work without being able to keep their income) in order to pay for the health care of someone they don’t even know. Including those who don’t take care of themselves the way that taxpayer has done. Is that fair?

In his piece this doctor does say some things I agree with:

The debate I witnessed in Washington in 2009 was never based on discussing how to fulfill the mission of the United States through a different form of health care delivery. Rather, a deal was concocted that preserved the basic aspects of the system we already had with third-party support of health care payments, despite the third parties (insurers) adding nothing to the health of anyone, but reaping huge profits for bookkeeping and risk management as a means to maximize shareholder value.

 

He’s right; Obamacare proponents have conflated health care with health insurance, even though insurance is simply one way to pay for health services (a way that has been enlarged mainly because of government interference). There are other ways. There are health savings accounts, and concierge medicine, and self-insuring, and paying cash.

He doesn’t look at the “less government interference options,” however; he thinks Obamacare simply doesn’t go far enough. My guess is what he wants is to have the federal government do a total takeover of health care, doling out care “equally.” He hates “inequity” (different outcomes) more than he loves freedom.

If the problem is separation of payer from service receiver, then why would adding government as an additional separator help? It just adds another layer of bureaucracy (the world’s biggest bureaucracy) between service receiver and payer—with all kinds of additional decisions being made by distant bureaucrats rather than patient and doctor.

People who see only the southern hemisphere—the portion on the Spherical Model where you go back and forth between the varied tyrannies of anarchy and government control—look the wrong direction. They have an unsupportable faith in government and its intellectual elites to “do it right the next time.” They never do it right. They can’t know what I and every individual buyer of health care services knows about our particular situations, preferences, and personal finances. But they’re unwilling to trust individuals to make decisions for themselves about what services to buy and how to pay for them.

Government’s lack of trust in individual citizens is an excuse for interference that always leads to further tyranny. We limit government because we know it can’t be trusted, and we trust ourselves with the rest. 

There’s another leap of logic story I came across over the weekend. It was handled well (as usual) by Matt Walsh (“I am afraid of this indisputable pro-choice argument” from March 4, 2014). The “frightening” “irrefutable” pro-choice (pro-abortion) argument is referred to as “bodily autonomy.” A reader calling herself “Rachel” says essentially that, if a person has bodily autonomy, then a woman has a right to stop that parasitic baby’s life at any point in pregnancy. She claims that a woman gestating her own child is equivalent to being forced to be tied up in a hospital bed next to a sick person, for nine months, sharing blood with the sick person, against one’s will.

It’s not a good analogy, and Matt Walsh covers the reasons. But I’m just going to point out the leap of logic from “we have control over our own bodies,” and “after consenting to the presence of a growing child by performing the procreative act, the mother should still be allowed to kill the growing baby at any point she chooses.” That’s quite a leap.

No one forced her (in cases that aren’t rape or incest) to invite the growing baby to grow in her womb. No one forced her to share her body with a stranger; the baby inside is her own offspring. No one forced her to stay confined in a hospital bed for nine months; pregnancy will cause varying levels of limitation, but most of the time the gestating mother just goes about her life as autonomously as ever.

The choice happens before conception. After that, another life is involved, growing where he/she was invited, and where he/she belongs. A closer analogy would be: after you invite someone into your home, at any time you can kill the visitor for breaking into your home. That would not go over well in a court of law.

We’re all pro-choice. But most of us think that choice was made when engaging in the behavior that has been known, for literally thousands of years, to lead to pregnancy—so ignorance can’t be the excuse. Maybe Rachel, like Obama, thinks God was wrong to have pregnancy follow that behavior, when she wants it without consequences. Whatever. She ought to take that up with God, rather than insisting that the rest of us are wrong for wanting to protect innocent human life.

Today's lesson: don't pretend it's logic when it's just a blind leap.

Counterfeits

I propose that, for every principle that leads to Spherical Model northern hemisphere freedom, prosperity, and thriving civilization, there is a counterfeit southern hemisphere claim. Here are just a couple of examples.

Rights

Our Constitution does a good job of spelling out many of our God-given natural rights relating to life, liberty, and property: freedom of religion, freedom of assembly, freedom of speech, freedom to defend self and others with arms, freedom to feel secure in our persons and papers, and more. The counterfeit was put forward by FDR, using the word rights that we were used to recognizing as a positive part of our free country. But he skewed it.

In our day certain economic proofs have become accepted as self-evident: a second bill of rights, under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all, regardless of station or race or creed. Among these are:

·         the right to a useful and remunerative job, the right to earn enough to provide food and clothing and recreation;

·         the right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return that will give him and his family a decent living;

·         the right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom—freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad;

·         the right of every family to a decent home; the right to adequate medical care, and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health;

·         the right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age—sickness, medicine, and unemployment;

·         the right to a good education.

All of these rights spell security. And after this war is won, we must be prepared to move forward in the implementation of these rights to new goals of happiness and well being. For unless there is security here and home, there cannot be lasting peace in the world.

 

What is a right? Something you are entitled to just by virtue of being born a human. God has granted it to you. Others are required to respect your rights, but not to provide them out of thin air. So when Roosevelt uses the term, what does he mean? Something that we’d all like to have. And if you assume these things are rights—must be given to everyone—then government takes the place of God as the provider of rights. Government gets its power—and its money—from the governed. So, what FDR is saying is, you are required to give up whatever portion of your life’s work the government confiscates so that the government can grant that as a gift to someone else, in order to claim it is a better provider than God.

You do have the right to seek a good job; but if you have a right to a good job, regardless of your efforts or abilities, that means someone is required to hire you regardless of your efforts or abilities. That doesn’t square with the business freedom “right” he lists just below. You have the right to purchase a good home or a good education, but if you must be given those purchasable things, someone must be enslaved to pay for them.

Family

Family is the basic unit of society. It is the way we get a new generation, and pass along the values and principles required for civilization to that new generation. It is based on, and bound by, love for one another.

If there’s going to be a southern hemisphere counterfeit, it is going to appeal to the sense of belonging we crave. But instead of feeling the sense of belonging to parents, ancestors, siblings, and posterity, the counterfeit version is belonging to the collective—the state in the southeast quadrant, or the gang, mob, mafia, or other cabal in the southwest quadrant. The principle is the same: the collective wants/needs override the individual wants/needs.

I saw the latest Star Trek movie this past weekend, always fun. They re-enacted in a different way a scene from an earlier movie (that is set in a later time), where Spock had sacrificed himself by entering the hot nuclear reactor. He had said, “It is logical. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few or the one.” But what has happened here? An individual sacrifices himself, because his love for the many he can save is greater than his love for his own life. “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends,” John 15:13 (King James Bible). That is the northern hemisphere version. Our soldiers do this for us. Our police take this risk. Last week we tragically lost four Houston firefighters who were acting on this honorable premise.

 

The southern hemisphere counterfeit takes the choice of sacrifice away from the individual, and replaces it with, “Because the collective is more important than the few or the one, the rights/wants/needs of the few or the one can be overridden at the will of those in control for the benefit of the collective.” This shows up in health care. If the collective is paying for health care, a costly and limited resource, then it is to the benefit of the collective to refuse care to whomever it deems less likely to benefit the collective: the elderly, the handicapped, the mentally impaired, the seriously ill. Everywhere in the world there has been state-run health care, there has been rationing, poorer service, loss of service to the elderly and seriously ill, and enforced euthanasia. There is no sacrifice involved; there is imposed punishment for being ill or elderly.

I’m in the middle of yet another youth novel, with the enemy being some entity trying to take over the world, ostensibly to “help” mankind (while incidentally giving unlimited power to the controlling bad guys). This one is Michael Vey, by Richard Paul Evans. The bad guy says things like, “Want is a thing of the past…. It’s a brave new world… with endless opportunities.” There’s a collection of young people with special electrical powers. They’ve been kidnapped and manipulated, and are essentially imprisoned. But the collection of them is called the family. If they don’t use their powers as required, to harm people and even murder, then the young person is punished and imprisoned. Most of them have succumbed, and the ones found at earlier ages were more easily manipulated. They’re made to feel “special,” told that they are eagles, among the chickens, and shouldn’t choose to act like chickens, or even worry about the chickens—because eagles eat chickens, after all.

When confronted with the discomfort of being asked to do something harmful, one who had been there from a young age said, “You get over it. At first you might hate it but before you know it, you’ll volunteer to do it…. Why do you care? We’re better than them.”

Ah, the old “we’re the important people and the others are subhuman” ploy, found in all savage tyrannies, wherever there is mass murder, genocide, or halocaust.

Belonging to a real family is something we’re designed by our Creator to respect and enjoy—where we can develop loving relationships that will help us in everything we do. The counterfeit is belonging to some replacement collective, with controllers that either tell us why we can disregard the rights of those supposedly beneath us, or why we are too insignificant to have our rights respected. There may be an inculcation of adoration for the collective. But real love—giving and receiving love—is missing.

Find something good in a society of freedom, free enterprise, and civilization, and there will be a correlative counterfeit in a society of controlled behavior, controlled economy, and savage disregard of the value of human life.

Economic Sphere Basics

Today is the second anniversary of the beginning of the Spherical Model blog, and we’re doing a recap of the basics of what the Spherical Model is. Friday’s summary covered the principles that lead to the northern freedom zone on the Political Sphere. Today’s summary covers the basic principles leading to the thriving free enterprise zone on the Economic Sphere. (I hope you'll read the full version of each.)

The principles themselves are simple. The preliminary discussion is basic economics, which doesn’t get taught nearly enough in schools. Here are some of the main points:

·        Wealth represents the accumulation of the results of labor.

·        Money is a representative, or symbol, of wealth, to make it easier to exchange.  

·        Problems of the economy as a whole always result from interference in the exchange of labor, or value of money.

·        There has never been a national recession or depression that wasn’t caused by interference with the money supply, or in other words dishonesty about the value of money.

·        Capitalism is a system of increasing productivity, and thereby increasing wealth.

o   Capital is extra time/work/wealth that is invested to make it possible to produce more wealth.

o   Capital in and of itself is simply never evil. Capital might be considered always good. It represents work above and beyond what is essential followed by careful use of it toward a good idea, resulting in even more surplus.

·        Government cannot create wealth; government can only spend it. Government can, however, regulate (that is, make standard) monetary units by coining money, or printing money, each unit of which represents a result of labor that can be exchanged for the results of someone else’s labor.

o   Government can cause harm by printing “money” that does not represent actual wealth.

With these things in mind, how do we identify ways to guarantee thriving free enterprise? Limit government to its proper role: protecting people and their property (wealth), and guaranteeing the value of the money. Maybe add to that some infrastructure to help facilitate commerce, and that’s about it. Every intervention by government to redistribute from those who have to those who have not causes unintended consequences that make things worse both for those being taken from and those being given to.

Capital is taken that could have been used for productive purposes, possibly that could have provided employment for those in need. Incentive is taken from those who would have freely given to the needy, taking their surplus so that they can’t decide to give, and making them resentful that they had no choice about the confiscation. And the receivers of government largesse feel entitled to the redistribution, since the faceless government, rather than a neighbor who did the earning of the wealth, has decided they deserve it. They are therefore ungrateful. If there had been a personal connection between willing giver and reluctant but grateful receiver, both could have benefitted and moved forward in a positive relationship.

The way to limit government is to recognize God-given rights and never allow government to usurp power over those things. That requires political freedom instead of tyranny, so you can see how free-enterprise overlays freedom in the north and controlled economy overlays tyranny in the southern hemisphere.

So freedom and economic thriving both require knowing what a right is. The Constitution, again, is handy for that. The first Ten Amendments were not an afterthought; they were understood clearly by the founders, so much so that they went without saying. But then some of the wiser ones wondered what would happen if these rights didn’t remain self-evident. So they were included before the Constitution was ratified.

They are in a way “negative rights”: God has given these to all men, and government shall not infringe upon them. Government, in other words, is limited, while the individual, in regard to rights, is not.

Then along come the “progressives,” who start talking about “positive rights,” things they think every person ought to have, and therefore government should have the ability to bestow upon them, things like a right to a job (regardless of skills), a right to food, a right to shelter. Are these things rights?

If it is a right, God has given it. But we all come into the world naked, impoverished, and inexperienced. It is by growth, hard work, and gaining in expertise that we try to overcome this condition throughout our life. We are born with the right to life, the right to live free (not enslaved), and the right to pursue our own path to overcome the naked impoverished state.

Do we have a right to clothing? Well, it’s sure nice to have the appropriate clothing when you live through a northern winter. But is it your neighbor’s obligation to work to provide your clothing? Or is that your own obligation? Would it be good of your neighbor to give you his surplus clothing if he saw you were in need? Yes. But his giving it to you is charity, or philanthropy, not an obligation to meet your right. If he had no surplus, but just enough clothing to keep himself from freezing, would it be his obligation to give up a coat to you? No. If he were heroic, he might work out a way to share with you and perhaps keep you both alive. But he is not obligated to do so. So, your clothing is not his obligation. Providing clothing for someone other than self is a charitable act.

At the basic level, the relationship of parent to child is charitable. The parent can clearly see that the child cannot provide his own clothing, so the parent, showing his care for the child, provides that clothing. Same with food. You might even say that the parent has an obligation to feed, clothe, shelter, and nurture the child, because the parent brought the helpless child into the world and therefore has an obligation to that child. But the obligation isn’t without limit. The parent nurtures the child to be capable of feeding, clothing, and sheltering himself. And then, at that point, the parent no longer has the obligation to provide. If the grown child has lost a job, and has a temporary need for economic help, it might be that the parent could step in and offer food, clothing, and shelter from his surplus (charity). But the parent would have no such obligation to a grown and capable child who lacked means simply because of unwillingness to work for them. And that parent would have absolutely no obligation to provide from his hard-earned supply to a lazy child of the neighbor down the road.

So, even though we need them, we do not have a right to food, clothing, and shelter. Ditto for a furnished apartment, a television, telephone, medical care, air conditioning, or a car. Nice to have. Important to have. Maybe even necessary to have in order to fulfill one’s purposes in life. But it is a capable person’s own obligation to work to provide these necessities for himself.

In a civilized society, there will be a desire to somehow provide these necessities to those who are not capable of taking care of themselves: the impoverished because of illness, accident, injury, or lowered mental capacity. But it is philanthropy that fills the need—not government taking from a producer by force to give to a non-producer.

Economic thriving, then, requires limited government, adherence to laws protecting property, and then a charitable people to care for the truly needy.