When we say someone has a right to something like life, liberty, property, free speech, the pursuit of happiness, and so on, what does “having a right” mean?
I grew up thinking the phrase implied something about the person or reality. On the contrary, as best I can tell, it says something about government. I can talk without the “right” to speak. Having the right means that if someone tries to stop me, agents from the government will prevent them from stopping me. Well, it depends where you are and how the place defines free speech. I guess in the US having the right means that agents of the government will not prevent you, and if they do try to prevent you, other agents from the government will stop them if before the fact or try to recompense you if after.
I don’t mean to bog down in the details. The point is that someone having a right to do something means people with certain roles in the government will prevent others from stopping you. To have a right to health care means that the government will create a system and pay for it.
When people say “Everyone should have a right to…”, they’re saying government should be obliged to do something.
I don’t think most people get what rights mean. Maybe I am missing something too. If so, I welcome corrections or criticism.
In a near-future post: What does it mean “to own” something?
Joshua,
Hope you are doing well. I read this post and couldn’t help but reflect on George Carlin. What is a right?
Carlin said there are no such things as rights. We made them up. Rights are an idea, they’re a cute idea, but they’re imaginary. He said if you ask someone where do rights come from, they’ll often times say from god, they’re god given rights. He cited the fact that our Constitution (remember we’re one nation under god) has 10 rights. The British have 13 rights, the Germans have 29 rights, the Belgians have 25, the Swedes have only 6, and some people have no rights at all. He asked, what kind of god given deal is that?
Carlin said if you do think you have rights here is an assignment for you. Go to Wikipedia and type in the search field, Japanese Americans 1942, and you find out about your precious fucking rights. In 1942, 110,000 Japanese-American citizens, in good standing, were thrown into internment camps simply because their parents were born in the wrong country. That’s all they did wrong. They had no right to a lawyer, no right to a fair trial, no right to a jury of their peers, no right to due process of any kind. Just when these American citizens needed their rights the most, their government took them away, and rights are not rights if someone can take them away.
You can see that again with trump. According to trump, the only right in the world is to have money and only certain white people have that right. It’s like I say about the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson left out two words intentionally although they were certainly implied when he wrote, all men are created equal. The two words – “Rich White”. I’m sure you can guess where they would be inserted.
The rights you cited, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness were supposed to be inalienable rights meaning they were supposed to be inherent to all individuals because of their humanity and could not be surrendered, taken away, or transferred by any government or person. Clearly, that was all a big lie along with the rest of the bullshit we’ve been fed our whole lives about this country.
The people credited with starting this country, the so called founders, or fathers of liberty, were just a bunch of land speculators. They received title to lands from a king who didn’t own the land. That is called fraud. So this country has been a fraud from the beginning. Rights, the Declaration, the Constitution were all part of an elaborate scheme of deception to allow the speculators to keep what they stole and have others work and take care of what they stole. That’s why the Constitution allowed slavery, it was one way to allow the speculators to keep the land legally by way of working it. This of course meant to grow crops that were commodities so the speculators could make even more money off of the land.
The different nations of people who were on this continent before the land speculators arrived didn’t have a concept of land ownership and didn’t have a thirst for land acquisition. They did care about resource acquisition like the other animals that lived on the land. But that care wasn’t about control or the commodification of resources, it was about the utilization, fair trade, and sharing of resources. All of which were foreign concepts to the newly arrived land speculators. Profit from the land is to speculators like oxygen is to living organisms – essential. That is why the two groups couldn’t get along, they held opposing views concerning land usage.
Every concept the invaders (speculators) used was for conquest and control of land. Manifest Destiny, land rushes, transportation networks, pretending certain metals were valued by printing non-valued paper and pretending the paper was backed with those metals, making loans, selling stocks, all were for the purpose of acquisition of land. If you couldn’t make a loan payment or you couldn’t sell enough stock to stay in business, you lost your land.
Believing that a government will do something for you or will do the right thing, is according to Carlin, a figment of imagination. As he said, “It’s called the American Dream, because you have to be asleep to believe it.”
Don