Politics & Rights

Adults have a moral right to spend their money as they see fit, and gambling companies have a moral right to offer their services as they see fit. So long as those gambling or offering gambling services do not violate rights, government has no moral right to interfere.

Inequality of resources per se is neither good nor bad. When government protects people’s rights and some people earn more wealth than others do by their own productive effort, the outcome is just. When government (or a criminal) violates people’s rights, the outcome (not to mention the act) is unjust—whether the result is more inequality or less.

Pharmacist Philip Hall is suing Walgreens, alleging that the company violated the 1964 Civil Rights Act when it fired him for refusing, on religious grounds, to sell the birth-control drug Plan B. But Walgreens is a pharmacy; the notion that it should be forbidden to require its employees who are hired to sell pharmaceuticals to actually sell pharmaceuticals is absurd.

As a chapter of the NAACP once concluded, “the ready access to a lifetime of welfare and free social service programs is a major contributory factor to the crime problems we face today.” The same holds for the related problems usually associated with high-crime neighborhoods, including high rates of absentee fathers, rampant drug abuse, gang violence, and the like.

The fundamental problem is that the government is unlawfully maintaining possession of the lands in question and failing to recognize legitimate property rights over those lands. Because the federal government “owns” the wilderness lands in question, in practice no one truly owns them; their control is at the mercy of political factions.

Legally mandated sick pay violates the moral rights of employers and employees to mutually agree to terms of employment. Government’s only proper role in this area is to protect the rights of employers and job seekers to contract voluntarily so that they can live their lives in accordance with their own judgment.

Especially encouraging is that George Will attempts to come to grips with the question of why individuals have rights. As Craig Biddle and Stephen Bourque write in response to an earlier article by Will in which he wrestles with the issue of rights, “rights are recognitions of certain factual requirements of human life and prosperity on earth.”

In terms of politics, the fundamental issue is not whether and in what ways individuals are willing to voluntarily share their wealth. The fundamental issue is whether individuals have a moral right to decide how to use their wealth. Real (classical) liberals hold that individuals have such a right; modern (leftist) “liberals” hold that individuals have no such right.

Slade Mendenhall reviews The Conscience of the Constitution: The Declaration of Independence and the Right to Liberty, by Timothy Sandefur.

A recent immigration proposal by U.S. House Republican leaders comports with the standard of individual rights in two important ways. First, it seeks to allow many immigrants now here illegally to “live legally and without fear in the U.S.” Second, it recognizes that such legal status need not be coupled with a path to citizenship.