John Singleton with Bob HowardRip Van Australia (Stanmore: Cassell Australia, 1977), pp. 216-19, under the heading “Rights”.

Just about everyone accepts the basic concept of individual or human rights. The main difficulty lies in determining just exactly what the concept means. We all have rights. What, then, are they?

Many different rights are often mentioned — the rights to life, freedom, property, equal opportunity, free education, free contraception, a decent wage, adequate healthcare, the pursuit of happiness, and so on. Are all of these valid, or only some of them? If only some, which ones and why?1

There are two essential points to be considered in sorting out those that can be truly said to be rights. Those that are not rights are either privileges or permits.

  1. Rights are held equally by all individual people and can only be held by individual people. They are not granted to people — people have rights simply because they are people.
  2. This implies that no person or group of people can violate the rights of any other person or group of people, for if they do, not all people hold rights equally. It further follows that, as each individual person has rights, each person is free to dispose of his or her rights as he or she thinks fit.

These two statements have enormous implications, and give clear cut means for determining what can be claimed as rights and what can’t. They also determine what governments can and cannot do. Perhaps the most important point of all is that rights cannot morally be violated — not at any time, in any way or by any person or group of persons. Private individuals can voluntarily delegate their rights, and/or forfeit them, however.

If all people have rights, because they are people, and those rights cannot be violated, then government don’t grant them, but can only recognise and protect them (that, after all, is supposed to be the primary function of governments), and by so doing, governments obviously can’t violate them. When a government undertakes to provide services or goods to people (for example, “free” contraception, “free” education, “adequate” healthcare, “equal” opportunity) what they are actually doing is granting privileges or permits to one section of the population at the expense of another. Who pays for the education, contraceptives, and health care? Who loses opportunities so that others may be given them? All people are supposed to have equal rights, but if some have their property expropriated to provide privileges for others, then the government is guilty of violating rights. Obviously, our governments do this all the time.

Thus, it is an inescapable fact that in Australia today nobody has any rights at all. What freedom we do have we have, not by right, but by government permission. The only time our rights are recognised is when a government does not have the constitutional power to commit any act that violates them. When the government does have such power, then we are completely at its mercy — just as, if a hold-up man was holding us at the point of a gun, we could only hope that he wouldn’t shoot us. Constitutions are intended to disarm governments and prevent them from acting as hold-up men. However, there hasn’t been a constitution written yet that hasn’t contained flaws that have allowed unscrupulous people to use it as an instrument of coercion.

What is taxation if it’s not theft; conscription if it’s not slavery; government schooling if it is not kidnapping or slavery; war if it is not mass murder; economic regulation if it is not coercion; fractional reserve banking if it is not fraud; and devaluation if it is not a refusal to pay debts? It cannot be claimed that the “wider rights of society” take precedence, or that “the public good” or “national interest” are more important.

Societies consist of collections of individuals. Societies are not separate entities with their own rights. Only individuals have rights, not societies. Nor can it be claimed that we have delegated our rights to the government. We (the authors) certainly didn’t delegate ours, and furthermore, we can’t recall having been asked.

Anyway, even if we did delegate our rights, could it be said that one group of us delegated to the government a “right” to loot another group to give us a privilege? There can be no such thing as a right to education, free or otherwise, or a right to healthcare, or contraception. It would make just as much sense to say we all have a right to a new Mercedes or a triple storey mansion. If we have a right to healthcare, that makes doctors slaves, because if they refused us healthcare they could be accused of violating our rights. If they have to give us this healthcare, why should we bother paying them? Hold-up men don’t pay their victims to stand with their hand up while they rob them — they don’t have to. And if no one pays doctors, how do doctors survive?

The only possible answer would be the socialist one — the State pays them. This puts doctors at the mercy of two sets of masters — the patients and the State. Then it must be asked — where does the State get its money from? Taxation, which is the forcible expropriation of wealth from those who rightfully own it. The same arguments apply to all government services. To say that people have a “right” to them is vicious garbage. They don’t. And to say they do is just a nice emotional rationalisation to cover up straight out thuggery.

The only rights we have are those that do apply equally: the rights to life, freedom and property, for example. (Equal[it]y, in this sense, means that for example, we all have an equal right to own property. It does not mean we all have a right to own equal amounts of property.) None of these rights are recognised by the State. Taxation robs people of part of their life, for in the time that they are forced to work to earn the money to pay taxes, they are slaves. One aspect of the right to freedom is the freedom to voluntary trade, and that obviously doesn’t exist. (It is conspicuously absent from both the Liberal and National Country Party platforms too, a feat which requires for its rationalisation a great deal of mental gymnastics.) The right to property is constantly violated by such things as taxation, land resumption, economic regulation, and so on, ad nauseum.

None of these rights can be construed to mean more than freedom of action either. The right to life does not mean that someone else should be forced to provide us with food, shelter, clothing, and other necessities. That would be obviously inconsistent, because it would violate the right of freedom, and rights must be held equally. The right to free speech does not mean that newspaper proprietors should be forced to provide us with pen, paper, and newspaper space; or that television network owners should provide us with time. The right to property does not mean that someone else should be forced to provide us with it.

What these rights do mean is that we should be free to try to acquire them, through our own effort and with the voluntary co-operation of others. Nobody has the right, as some are claiming now, to an “adequate living wage”. The factor that is always forgotten in these claims is: where does the money come from? In practice, such claims mean that “we demand that other people be forced to support us”.

Where people do delegate their rights are in such things as voluntary euthanasia (suicide, incidentally, is simply a person exercising his right of ownership of his/her life — every person has the moral right to take their own life, but only if they have no contractual obligations left to fulfil), the appointment of agents to carry out certain tasks, and through all manner of voluntary contractual arrangements. A sadist-masochist sexual relationship, for example, does not involve any violation of rights if all partners consent to it.

People forfeit their rights only when they violate those of others. We can’t violate rights and then turn around and insist that our own be respected (see Crime; Justice). By our action of violating rights we indicate that we do not respect them. It would be gross hypocrisy to then insist that our own were respected — after, that is, it has been established that we were guilty of the violation of the rights in question.

The issue of rights is a crucially important one, and, currently, an incredibly confused one. If we could firmly establish the principle of rights in our society, we would have the necessary rules for resolving most, if not all, social conflicts. Needless to say, that’s something we could all desperately use right now.

Footnote

  1. For a serious philosophical discussion of the concept of rights, see: Nathaniel Branden, “Ethical Egoism: A Reply to Professor Emmons,” The Personalist, Spring, 1970, pp. 196-311; and “Ethical Egoism — Continued,” The Personalist, Summer, 1970, pp. 305-313. Tibor Machan, “A Note on Emmons’ Random Observations,” The Personalist, Winter, 1971, pp. 96-106; and Human Rights and and Human Liberties, Nelson-Hall, Chicago, Ill., 1975. Eric Mack, “How to Derive Ethical Egoism,” The Personalist, Fall, 1971, pp. 735-743.