The Nature of Rights and Government

by Rocco Valentini

Artwork Sourced from Pinterest. Artist: Unknown.

The Nature of Rights and Government

by Antonio Rocco Stea (Rocco Valentini)

Rights do not exist independently of society. Rights exist to ensure your survival in a social context; if an individual lived alone on a desert island, there would be no need for rights. Rights should not be confused with privileges granted by others or the state; rights are inalienable and stem from the fact that you, and only you, own your life. As a result of owning your life, you consequently own the things necessary to sustain your life, such as your liberty—which includes your actions, both intellectual and physical—as well as your property, which refers to the material consequences of said actions.

While you own your life, as well as your liberty and property by extension, you do not own others’ lives, nor are they required to sustain your life. There are no group or collective rights; your rights end where another individual’s begins. You are not entitled to anything from anyone else unless it is earned or given to you voluntarily with the explicit consent of the benefactor. People who talk about the idea of positive rights and negative rights instead of individual rights are advancing a view of human beings being treated as property of the state. According to this view, the individual’s product and labor can be seized from them against their will and distributed to others. In other words, people who advocate for the false positive-negative rights dichotomy are advancing the idea of a collective form of slavery and challenging the idea that the individual owns their life, claiming it is merely being loaned to them courtesy of the state or society.

Almost everything the government does violates individual rights in some way. However, an anarchist or government-free society would not be ideal, as it would be a system of tyranny by the strongest. It would essentially be a private democracy in which every dollar is a ballot where the rich can vote away people’s individual rights and where the laws could change in accordance with consumer demand, to the potential detriment of any cultural dissenters. In practice, private security and private law firms would be nothing more than mercenary outlets at the beck and call of the highest bidders, who would devour each other in a moment-to-moment power struggle. Tribal warfare would also break out as different groups try to establish a monopoly on force over a given territory to enforce their rule, possibly leading to the creation of localized totalitarian states.

A minarchist or minimal framework of government is an absolute necessity to protect individual rights, particularly the courts, to handle disputes between claimants and enforce private contracts; the military, to handle foreign armies; and the police, to handle domestic criminals. A minarchist government would not be an initiator of force but rather a retaliatory agent whose sole purpose is to safeguard the individual. While the individual is entitled to their own life, liberty, and property and can do what they want with them, including destroy them, they cannot infringe upon the individual rights of someone else. What can be legitimately considered a crime is the violation of another individual’s rights, i.e., theft, murder, rape, assault, fraud, breaches of contract, trespassing, vandalism, etc.

In a democracy, the concept of individual rights—the sphere of one’s actions and possessions, what one can do and what one can own—is reduced to a mere bargaining chip in a never-ending tug of war between pre-existing and up-and-coming political factions. In short, the essence of human freedom becomes nothing but the result of a contest between groups. However, in non-democratic systems such as dictatorships, autocracies, or absolute monarchies, individual rights are constantly at risk of being eroded or destroyed by the arbitrary whims of the ruling class. It is only in a constitutional republic that individual rights can be sufficiently protected by the rule of law and restrictions on the arbitrary exercise of power and authority.

All current methods of taxation rely on theft or extortion and violate individual rights. The immediate solution that pops into most people’s minds is a voluntary poll tax. However, a voluntary poll tax would result in a free rider problem, as some individuals may choose to opt out of paying taxes while still benefiting from the services funded by those who do pay. This can create an unsustainable situation where the cost burden falls on a smaller group of individuals. Over time, this could lead to inadequate funding, resulting in the deterioration of essential infrastructure needed to protect the individual rights of the population.

One possible solution is the single tax or land value tax created by Henry George, which is the only ethical method of taxation currently existing that would respect individual rights while also being practical and functional. LVT is not as distortive as other forms of taxation and does not tax property or land improvements made by humans. The value of land is influenced by factors beyond individual efforts. The unimproved value of land refers to the value of the land in its natural state, without any human-made improvements. This value can be estimated through various methods, such as comparative sales analysis or rental income analysis. LVT can be rationally justified since an individual would essentially be paying rent to their society for exclusive ownership of a particular piece of territory, which will then be used to fund the minimal state that protects their rights. LVT would also minimize disputes over land in society since land is a finite resource.

In addition to positive features like sound money, price mechanisms for economic calculation, a division of labor, and social mobility, laissez-faire or free-market capitalism is the logical outgrowth of individualism since it treats property as inviolable and property rights are inextricably linked to individual rights. Laissez-faire capitalism is a decentralized bottom-up, pro-choice economic system built upon mutual benefit, voluntary exchange, voluntary cooperation, and voluntary association.

In laissez-faire capitalism, all transactions depend on informed consent between rational actors. As such, negative externalities, which refer to economic activities that affect third parties without their consent, such as pollution, should be handled through an appropriate system of torts. There must also be controls on certain market activities—such as purchasing drugs and alcohol, sex work, and participating in elective surgeries—for children since they do not qualify as rational actors who can reliably produce informed consent. Various scientific fields, such as neurology and psychology, have demonstrated the vast cognitive differences between an adult and a minor. A child or teenager’s capacity for mental organization, maintaining focus, logic, judgment, long-range thinking, etc., is comparatively inferior, and their anatomical brains are empirically less developed. Their rights will be held in trust by their parents or guardians until they reach the legal age of adulthood to ensure they are not exploited and do not incur permanent psychological or physiological damage.

In conclusion, a Constitutional Minarchist Republican style of government with a free market is the only moral system since it fully respects individual rights. A Constitutional Minarchist Republic is an objective framework of government built around a self-evident moral axiom that cannot be refuted: that the individual’s life is theirs and no one can tell them what to do with it as long as they respect others’ rights. Any other system is inherently evil and relies on various forms of coercion, disregarding the sovereignty of the individual, seeing them as a means to the ends of others rather than an end in themselves.