Replying to Avatar Jeff Swann

Rights that someone else has to provide cannot he rights. You have no right to anyone else's time or labor (that would be slavery). You must trade value for value. All natural rights are negative rights.

You own yourself

You exist in time:

Past, present, future

When someone steals from you they are taking the product of your past & retroactively enslaving you. You have a right to own the things you have produced or that you earned & traded for.

When someone attempts to coerce or enslave you they are stealing your present. You have the right to live & speak & act, so long as it doesn't involve coercion or enslavement of others.

When someone murders you they are stealing your future. You have a right to live so long as you can keep yourself alive.

No person may initiate violence or theft or fraud. Beyond that there can be no other rights. You are not entitled to leisure, certain living standards, education, or food or housing. Those things cannot be guaranteed. A guarantee would have to be provided by someone else. If others failed to provide you with any of those you would have to initiate coercion to enforce such "rights."

If someone violates your natural negative rights by stealing from you or defrauding or engaging in coercion then they have lowered the interaction into the sub-rational animal realm & can be responded to as though they are a violent animal that one must fend off or destroy.

These basic moral principles are prerequesites to a civilized society. You cannot add rights as a way to advance society. You can only corrupt the foundation on which an advanced society is built & destroy individual liberty in the process.

Attempting to change or add positive foundational rights is like an extreme sort of layer violation in a complex computer architecture. The foundation must be fixed & unchanging with protection of the negative rights of individuals as the only task.

Sound money prevents the erosion of the value of one's past efforts & facilitates fair trades, which is another huge part that is needed to build a healthy society.

The productivity unlocked by the freedom created via negative rights & sound money can eventually create incredibly high living standards for everyone. Education can be free, as it mostly already is with internet access. All sorts of things can be free to the degree we can build economically sustainable businesses to provide them by generating revenue in other ways. But the need to exchange value for value never goes away. There is no "post scarcity" society. We can only aim to understand scarcity so well that we get extremely good at working around it.

What is the nature of rights? Are they self-enforcing? If not, in what sense are they real or valid?

Reply to this note

Please Login to reply.

Discussion

They are the things you'd have alone in the wilderness. People should add to your life not take from it. We are social creatures, anti-social behavior (theft, coercion, murder) should be opposed.