Rights and Pseudo Rights; J. Lindl

with full political ownership and economic control, i.e., total human slavery. This view is exemplified to its fullest extent by commu nism, but has preva.iled in varying degrees throughout the entire his tory of mankind. The other (and only) alterna tive is individual liberty with pri vate ownership rights, economic freedom, and political protection of the individual as an independ ent agent, exemplified briefly (im perfectly, but significantly) by capitalism in American history. f) RIGHTS guarantee to every American. the "right" to a minimum yearly in come. As such it merely represents a logical extension of recent trends of the sixties which has seen a proliferation Qf "rights" - rights to health care, education, housing, jobs, and fooo .•The only difference 74 THE FREEMAN February between this and other measures that have been enacted is its scope and potential for expansion. But bills enacted in the late sixties were more expensive than those of the early sixties, and so forth. As such, this is just a continuing trend, too. All of these bills are of a single nature and must be ana lyzed as such.

Their common denominator is the "rights" they declare, a strange set of rights, indeed. De spite the rhetoric of proponents who claim these are rights guar anteed to every American, they quite obviously are not. If every American quit working, there would be no goods to satisfy their claims for these rights. So these bills in effect provide goods and services to those who have not pro vided for themselves, at the ex pense of those who have. A "right" of one person that can only be satisfied at the expense of another is obviously no right at all. It is a decree that sets up two classes of people, those served, and those re quired to serve. The proliferation of such laws is one of the most dangerous developments in recent U.S. political history. A primary right must always be a right to action, not ,to goods as such. All goods must be produced by prior actions and hence are al ready someone's rightful property.

The right to act implicitly ineludes the responsibility for the consequences of one's action and the right to the use and disposal of the products of one's action. The rights of the American Con stitution are all proper rights to action. But the very principle of these rights has been undermined by the growth of belief in various pseudo-rights. The Nature of Rights Rights reside in individuals. There is no such thing as group rights except as they' are an ex tension of individual rights. A political right which is not pos sessed by every individual, regard less of his membership in a group, is merely a license for a particular group to exploit others not in the group. For example, consider "Welfare Rights." This is gen erally ta.ken to mean the right to the means for a certain level of ex istence. Is this a right, universally applicable to all? Could we guar antee to everyone the right to a minimum subsistence without im posing on some group the respon sibility of providing that sub sistence? Clearly not. This is the test to distinguish between a genuine and a bogus right. If it applies equally to all, at the ex pense of no one in particular, it is a genuine right~ If some one group benefits while another foots the bill, it is a counterfeit.

1972 RIGHTS AND PSEUDO-RIGHTS 75 A common response to these ar guments is that a majority of the. people have elected the representa tives who have passed the laws; so they really have chosen freely where their money and effort should go. But even on the face of it, this is not true. A member of Congress can be elected by 51 per cent of the vote. But even that 51 per cent is surely going to dis agree with their representative a fair fraction of the time. So, be fore a candidate ever records a vote, he probably has fewer than 50 per cent of the voters behind him. And then, legislation can be passed with the assent of a mere 51 per cent of the legislators, further reducing the likelihood tha t even a maj ori ty of persons agree with the decision. So the best one can say of a representa tive democratic process is that the largest fraction wins. Democracy Justified in Maintaining The Rule of Law The only justification for a sys tem where the largest fraction im poses its will on everyone else is that such a system has historically been the most effective in curbing and limiting the police power of the state. This police power is a necessary protection against those members of every society who would try to impose their will by force or fraud on other human beings. A government whose po lice power is used solely for this purpose is no threat to any peace ful citizen, since it may never ini tiate the use of force. It only acts to prevent the use of force. His torically, no people has ever achieved a society whose govern ment strictly adhered to this func tion. But the democracies of the world have come closest; and of them, the United States of the nineteenth century came closest of all. This achievement of democ racy is its only justification. If it fails in this function, a democ racy has no justification at all.

Majority tyranny is no less a tyr ranny because it is a majority. The argument that democracy justifies the various pseudo-rights is pernicious. It perverts the func tion of democracy and further ob scures the meaning of rights. In the end it serves to destroy democ racy by giving rise to pressure group warfare. Until these facts are recognized and acted upon, the present trend in domestic legislation will con tinue with undiminished vigor. ~ ON RE-READING RAY L. COLVARD THE STORY, perhaps apocryphal, is told of ~ young man who had a long, earnest conversation with his father on the eve of the son's departure for the university. When he was graduated, he talked with his father again. As the youth de scribed it: It was amazing how much the old man had learned in four years. A few years ago, when I re ceived a copy of The Law from Dr. George C. Roche III, then Di rector of Seminars for the Foun dation for Economic Education, I was not immediately impressed.