Rights or Privileges?

Anyone who’s read this blog for long, either here or in its former incarnation as a blogspot blog, knows I don’t usually quote articles from elsewhere at great length… unless there’s little way to extract the meat from the nut in shorter excerpts.

Walter Williams has a recent article that is far richer than the lengthy quote below, and I urge you to read the whole thing. Nevertheless, here’s a good mouthful of a highly “nutritious” article:

The way our Constitution’s framers used the term, a right is something that exists simultaneously among people and imposes no obligation on another. For example, the right to free speech, or freedom to travel, is something we all simultaneously possess. My right to free speech or freedom to travel imposes no obligation upon another except that of non-interference. In other words, my exercising my right to speech or travel requires absolutely nothing from you and in no way diminishes any of your rights.

Contrast that vision of a right to so-called rights to medical care, food or decent housing, independent of whether a person can pay. Those are not rights in the sense that free speech and freedom of travel are rights. If it is said that a person has rights to medical care, food and housing, and has no means of paying, how does he enjoy them? There’s no Santa Claus or Tooth Fairy who provides them. You say, “The Congress provides for those rights.” Not quite. Congress does not have any resources of its very own. The only way Congress can give one American something is to first, through the use of intimidation, threats and coercion, take it from another American. So-called rights to medical care, food and decent housing impose an obligation on some other American who, through the tax code, must be denied his right to his earnings. In other words, when Congress gives one American a right to something he didn’t earn, it takes away the right of another American to something he did earn.

I hope that whetted your appetite for more. Please do go read the whole thing.

Served up at CustomerServant and Blue Star Chronicles.