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Of Hammers and Health Care: Understanding the Nature of Rights
Fifty-five years later, what was a radical rethinking of our founding principles is considered common wisdom and uncontroversial dogma. More and more people believe that the "right" to these material objects is, in fact, the implementation of the Jeffersonian ideal. "How can we have a right to live," they say, "without having the right to the food and medicine we require to live?" "How can you have a moral right to life," they ask, "without being given the practical values required to live it?" Hence the "Economic Bill of Rights" But this view of rights is not only impractical it is also, as I will demonstrate, entirely immoral. This supposed view of rights, so commonly held, is the mechanism by which our actual rights are being destroyed.
I'm not a Republican or a Democrat. I'm an Objectivist. To paraphrase the Declaration of Independence, I hold these truths to be rationally demonstrable: that men live, that they survive by the use of their minds, that they must work and produce to sustain their lives, that it is good for them to live self-sufficiently as morally autonomous individuals, and that the political expression of this hierarchy is the concept of 'rights' which are sanctions of action in a social context. Man survives by use of his mind, and so he must be free to act on his own judgment. What is true of one man is true of all- so we must respect the rights of others. Political philosophy recognizes that we each have a delimited sphere of non-conflicting freedoms. What must be banned from society is the initiation of physical force by one man against another. All rights therefore delimit the sphere of action in which each man has the right to function without force or threat of force. Immediately, it begs the question- to be provided BY WHOM? Instead of a delimited sphere of non-conflicting freedoms, this view of rights establishes a set of overlapping claims- things that each man may demand of other men. In my view, this is a fundamental error in politics. It was introduced as a philosophical principle relatively recently in America- with FDR. It's philosophical roots go back further. This view of rights actually invalidates and destroys the legitimate rights I list above. What does it mean to have a "right" to an object (or service)? Let's pick an object at random and imagine what it means to claim a right to the thing. Let's arbitrarily assert a "right to a hammer". After all, we each require shelter and you can't build a house without a hammer, so let's assert that each man, by virtue of his need, should be given a hammer with which to build. Given- by whom? Men aren't born with hammers. They don't exist in nature unless you count a rock which you could bang something with. But we're not talking about rocks, we're talking about a manufactured item called a hammer. How do you implement the '"right" to this object? If I have a right to a hammer, who will provide me with one? The only answer is "those who possess hammers". (We might call them the "hammer-rich"). How did those people get the hammers? Since hammers are a manufactured item at some point no hammers existed anywhere. Someone had to invent the hammer, show others how to make them, trade the hammers, etc. Those who have hammers today amassed them either by making them, purchasing them, inheriting them, or stealing them. If they made the hammers, they exerted the effort to smelt the metal, carve the wood, and assemble the hammer. By my view of rights, they own their own effort and the product of that effort. If they bought the hammers, someone else may have exerted the effort of creation but the current owners still had to produce values- they had to grow wheat which they traded for the hammers or provide services which they exchanged for the hammers. If they inherited the hammers, then the current owners did not exert the effort by which the hammers were originally bought, but someone did- and that person expressed their own right to dispose of their property as they chose. This same situation applies to any circumstance in which the hammer is given as a gift or as charity- the owner is exercising his property rights by choosing to give away the item. If they stole the hammers, they violated the rights of others by force. So by what right do you claim a hammer for yourself? You are not requiring yourself to exert any effort by which you earn the hammer. You're not manufacturing it or earning it by trade. No one is choosing to give you a hammer as inheritance. You are not receiving it voluntarily as a gift or as charity. You are claiming it by right You are claiming the right to the unearned property of others. You do not fall into the category of maker, earner or inheritor of the item. You merely demand it. And, if you establish this hypothetical right as a political principle, you expect the government to provide it to you. But the government is not a manufacturer of hammers, or of anything. The government may absorb productive businesses by nationalization, but they cannot run them- compulsion and innovation are incompatible. The government is that organization which is established to have the legal monopoly over the use of force in a geographical area. If you live in a free society, that government would be delimited to the defense, not the violation, of rights. But we are not talking about the system of non-conflicting rights I describe. We are talking about the implementation of your political idea: that the government must provide a different kind of "right"- not the freedom of each man from each, but rather that the government must enforce those claims that each man may make on other men. The implementation of your "right to a hammer" means that the government will take a hammer from some other person who possesses it and give it to you. So you are not the maker, earner or inheritor of the item- but instead fall into the last category- you will have a hammer by theft. You are not getting your own hands dirty. You are not taking the item you want directly by pulling a gun, by threatening some man's life or liberty, by denying him his right to pursue his own happiness and to enjoy his own property. You are demanding that the gun be pulled on your behalf by a third party. The implementation of a "right to a hammer", in practice, requires that the government act as your agent to violate the life, liberty, property, and pursuit of happiness of some other man of its choosing- to steal his property and convey it into your possession. Each right that you claim in this manner, requires such a violation. Every "Economic Right" you demand sets the government in motion to violate the rights proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence. Every cash transfer into your pocket is taken from someone else or is funded by printing money which is not backed by any physical commodity but is asserted to have value by the government. Yet, even then, each printing is funded by someone's productivity somewhere- either in current generations or else is passed on as trillions of dollars in obligations foisted on someone's children or grandchildren. By declaring "Economic Rights", you establish a system, not of mutual independence where all values are received by mutual trade, but a system by which men are forced into gangs- each gang pressuring the government for his own share of the loot they demand by right which must be grabbed by force of arms off of some other citizen disarmed by law. Note that the only man who is safe in this system is the man who produces nothing. In your system, the more a man works, the more he produces, the more he is a target. The greater the effort, the greater the ingenuity, the greater the wealth, the more a man is expected to provide to others without compensation. He is punished to the degree of his ability. The higher he rises, the greater his punishment. The men who are safe are not the men of ability, but the men of need. The less you produce, the less you work, the more indigent and self destructive and debased you become, the more needs you have. If need is the standard, then the man with less than nothing is the King of Society. This is true in principle and it is being demonstrated in practice the world over. It was the cause of the fall of the Soviet Union, and is the black rotten core of every collectivist system that preaches "From Each according to their Ability, to Each according to their Needs" Now, I don't think that those of you who advocate Universal Health Care want any of this or know that this is the only means by which your ends can be accomplished. I don't think you’re consciously advocating a collectivist slave society or anything of the sort. You are, on the whole, kind people acting out of benevolence and according to a generally accepted (though mistaken) premise. But whether you know it or not, whether you want it or not, whether you'll admit it or not, a slave society is what you're advocating in principle and what you will enshrine in practice. It is merely a matter of degree and time. As soon as any man can claim an object as a right, the government will begin to expand into a tyranny. Once the principle is violated and the government turns from the defender into the violator of rights, the path is set and- twisty though the road may be- it leads to total slavery of every man to every other with the government holding the whip. That destination is inevitable unless the principle of rights is restored. Bad rights drive out good rights. In less than sixty years, the entire political underpinning of the American System has been subverted and reversed. At this rate in sixty more years (probably less) we will be a dictatorship. We are on the road to hell, my friends. Let us turn back to that fork in the road and reconsider the path we've been taking. -Richard Gleaves
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