Nonsense On Stilts

Last updated 03/18/07.

Published on: March 10, 1998

A great deal of nonsense is written about liberty, freedom, and rights. These are classic glittering generalities of populist propaganda.

That's not to say liberty, freedom, and rights are bad. It's to say that unless we carefully examine what's represented as liberty, freedom, or rights, we'll be easily manipulated.

The very first thing to understand about this triad is that every liberty, freedom, or right for one person restricts the liberty, freedoms, or rights for every other person. For example, the classic "your freedom to swing your fist ends at my nose" illustrates this tradeoff. This example is also usually considered a good trade: some other "freedoms" might not be such a good trade.

The second important thing to understand is that liberty, freedom, and rights are entirely social constructs. (See A Positive Account of Property Rights .) They exist only because we have social conventions that enforce them.

A "right" is of the form "A claims a right to do B with C receiving benefit D and creating a reciprocal obligation for E to permit this despite incurring cost F because of threatened cost G produced at cost H from I". (It can get lots more complicated.)

For example, "Joe (A) claims a right to manufacture widgets (B) on his property (C) for commercial sales (D), and neighbor Fred (E) has to tolerate the odors, noise, traffic, etc. (F) because if he interferes he will be fined (G) in a civil lawsuit (H) brought by Joe (I)."

Discussions about rights frequently ignore the reciprocal obligation, its cost, and the threat and its cost. Probably because claimants would prefer to pretend the right comes for free.

This is why the economics of rights is peculiar, why rights are never absolute in practice, and why exceptions to rights are abundant in societies. The makeup of A, E, and I, and the relationship between D, F, G, and H will determine whether a right to do B with C can be economic to produce.

For example, we have a right to freedom of speech, but we also have libel, slander, trademark, copyright, fraud, and other law which handle special cases where costs of truly free speech would easily get out of hand.

Interestingly, I saw a reference to a UN Universal Declaration Of Responsabilities to balance the UN Universal Declaration Of Human Rights. This is a relatively rare exception to the usual focus on the rights alone.

Incidently, the USA is unusual in its extreme focus in terms of rights and not responsabilities. Most Americans (including myself, until recently) are quite parochial about this bizarre focus. The origin and consequences of this has been well described in Rights Talk : The Impoverishment of Political Discourse by Mary Ann Glendon. Counter image omitted.