Phil Elmore: Individual Authoring Services

Do Our Rights Come at the Expense of Others?
by Phil Elmore

In the course of an Internet debate on the nature of a "right to healthcare," I was once asked this:

What rights can we have at the expense of others? Even if our government exists only to protect our property and national security, are we still not pursuing happiness at the expense of others? The government cannot function without taxes, even in the most minimal form, so our rights to vote and to be free are already coming at someone else's expense. I am merely suggesting that the right to health care, since it is necessary to maintain those other rights, should be protected, as well.

Sadly, that statement reflects a profound lack of understanding of what it means to possess rights. As I've said elsewhere more than once, and as written by certain Objectivist authors, a right is a right to action -- not a claim on the goods and services of others.

Our rights to vote and to be free do not come at the expense of others. They are the natural state of affairs for free people. Yes, the government does indeed confiscate a certain amount of income for even the most minimal of expenses, but each person who pays benefits from that protection and from that right to vote. This is not the same as taking money from you in order to fund health care for me. (We do indeed run into the problem of free-loading here, as always occurs when dealing with free-market solutions to infrastructure issues, but this is solved through the fostering of competitive subscription services.)

There is no right to good health. One's pursuit of happiness is not synonymous with the achievement of it. I am not owed medical treatment simply because I am alive. I could construct a variety of utilitarian arguments claiming that caring for the health of society's members has pragmatic benefits -- but this does not touch the moral issue of taking the income or the time or the effort of one human being and giving it to another human being because the second person believes he or she is entitled to the first person's efforts.

One's natural rights -- to be free, to pursue happiness, to hold property -- do not come at the expense of others when individuals respect one another as sovereign trading entities, the wealth, possessions, and property of whom can only be transferred from one individual to another through consensual exchange.

The only means through which human beings can deal with each other is through trade or compulsion -- persuasion or force. In a free society, individuals are traders. They exchange value for value when one person desires something that another person has (or offers as a service).

If you have nothing to offer in trade -- no money, no ability to render a service, no assets whatsoever -- you cannot, indeed, participate in the market. By what rationale would you then take assets or services from another human being? If there is no exchange, you are living at their expense -- and unless they give of themselves voluntarily, they must be forced to keep you alive.

My liberty does not come at the expense of another person. I have the right to pursue happiness and the right to attempt to remain extant -- but I cannot do it at the expense of others, and the second I attempt to do so without their consent I am violating their rights as sovereign individuals.

To put it another way -- your right to your life is not synonymous with a guarantee that you will continue living. If you are diseased and destitute, you cannot exercise your rights to do much of anything -- but you still have them. That is where the disconnect exists, I think: we must remember that possessing a right does not guarantee success in exercising it, and the two are not the same.

(Now, as for the costs of health care, the simplest and best way to reduce health care costs for all Americans is to drastically reduce the level of government and bureaucratic involvement in it.)

There will always be people in ill health or to whom life's random events have dealt adversity. And there will always be people -- even self-interested people -- who, recognizing the inherent nobility of human beings and the potential value they represent, feel benevolent towards their fellow humans and desire their well-being. That is the best motive from which charity stems. And it will always occur. It would be a rare society indeed whose members were so cold-hearted as to simply let others die. I merely state, quite rightly, that charity should be voluntary rather than demanded by the State.

For the State to remain "just us," it must remain minimal. A government becomes a separate entity, dangerous to individual liberty, when it reaches a size significantly smaller than ours is right now -- which means we passed that point long ago.

In a free society, governments are instituted to protect individual rights. That is a government's only legitimate role -- and we must define that role narrowly by avoiding the tendency to declare as "rights" things those claims that really aren't.

Therefore, I disagree emphatically with the assertion that the exercise of one's natural rights somehow impedes on those of others. At no time in the course of my day do I in any way interfere with the sovereign rights of other individuals -- and the pursuit of my own life and happiness in no way harms another human being.

In the course of further debate on the topic, the following statement was directed to me. Its author believes, or did believe, that laissez faire Capitalism would destroy society, and certain welfare rights were basic to human beings within society.

First of all, they may well always be benevolent people, but in a capitalistic system, there will never be enough.

This is an idea that must be disputed and refuted. The more free a society is -- the more income its citizens retain -- the more they donate to charity. The United States is the most generous nation in the world. Its citizens donate to charity -- apart from their taxes -- at remarkable levels. If my government did not relieve me of a third of my paycheck before I even receive it, I too would have more money to donate to causes I believed worthy.

(Of course, I also have fundamental philosophical and moral problems with forcing benevolence, which is what all redistribution of wealth for the achievement of egalitarian ends really is.)

The possession of property in no way infringes on the rights of others to possess property (or do anything else), though it does prevent them from possessing that same property -- which is why individuals in a free society must deal rationally with one another, as traders who exchange value for value.

I don't believe there's any evidence on which to base predictions of societal collapse when free-market principles are embraced. To the contrary, the more free a society is -- the more it respects the rights of individuals -- the stronger it becomes. The success of the early United States of America is a testament to the benefits of a society built on these Enlightenment ideals (though we're busy moving away from those principles in the vain attempt to cure societal ills by applying Statist principles).

By contrast, totalitarian states invariably collapse under their own weight, either because of an inability to set prices for goods and services actually desired by the people (the failure of socialist economics) or because of internal unrest and revolt (the failure of Statist attempts to control individuals in the name of "safety," "security," "fairness," or what have you).

My entire point is that it is not the appropriate role of government to guarantee you good health, wealth, or any other assets at the expense of others. No, every citizen cannot have ironclad insurance of prosperity. A government exists to protect narrowly-defined natural rights. These do not include guarantees of success or achievement. As I've said many times, that you have, as a citizen, the natural right to pursue your life and happiness does not guarantee that you will achieve either goal.

If I have no job, no money, and I am physically infirm, I cannot, indeed, exercise the right (which I still possess) to own property, for example, because I have nothing to exchange for that property. It does not then become the responsibility of the State to make it possible for me to gain that property simply on the basis of my need or desire for it. I have the right to own property if I can obtain the means. The State does not exist to guarantee those means.

I remember vividly an event from my childhood. In school, perhaps sometime in High School, a Health teacher once ran the class through an exercise. We estimated the average monthly expenses for the basics of life: food, clothing, rent, perhaps a car, perhaps a small budget for entertainment, health care, and so forth. We then compared that number to the minimum wage multiplied by the average number of work hours in a standard week. Surprise, surprise -- the expenses were far higher than the minimum wage earner's monthly income.

To her credit, the teacher did not use this as an opportunity to profess support for the economically disastrous concept of a government-mandated "living wage." Instead, she rightly emphasized that each and every one of us, if we wanted to live good lives, must strive for success in school and go on to college, in order to secure for ourselves an income from which we actually could live. My own father stressed this same point many times in my childhood, and it is a lesson I have never forgotten.

As for that "living wage," anyone with a basic grasp of economics should understand that the more wages are artificially inflated, the more harm is done to the natural market mechanics of an economy. I once conversed with a resident of the Netherlands who disputed that. His economy had not collapsed, he said. My response? Perhaps a "living wage" in the Netherlands has not sent the economy teetering to the brink of an apocalypse to rival the starkest of Mad Max movies, but it certainly has made it less competitive and less productive than it could be otherwise. The same is true in the United States. Here, exportation of jobs -- which harms, economically, members of the domestic labor force -- is a direct result of the cheaper labor available elsewhere for the same work.

When wages for a specific activity are raised above the actual value for that work, employers have two choices if they wish to maintain the same level of solvency. They can find cheaper labor elsewhere (which means going to another country), or they can cut their work force. Each time the minimum wage experiences a significant increase in this country, employers -- particularly small-business-oriented chain franchise owners whose young employees typically work for close to minimum wage -- must cut their work forces, reducing the availability of those jobs to people seeking them.

The ruin done to an economy may be neither total nor absolute, but it most certainly is done. An "adequate" minimum wage -- a term that euphemistically refers to a wage artificially inflated through government mandates -- is ultimately economically disastrous, and this idea is supported by economic facts and basic economic theory.

Sometimes I wonder, in the course of Internet debates on the topic, if I was the only person listening during Microeconomics and Macroeconomics in college.

You see, ultimately, life isn't fair, and it is not the legitimate role of the government of a free society to attempt to make it so. The tenets of egalitarianism sound remarkably compassionate -- but they are ultimately destructive. The redistribution of wealth divorces individuals from the products of their labors, fosters a dependent underclass, creates division and resentment, and leads to the eventual collapse of society.

Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage's whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.

-- Ayn Rand