Just let me repeat what I just posted:
Of course, social and economic guarantees are controversial. Consider the widespread view that democracies should respect "negative rights," or rights against government interference, but should not acknowledge "positive rights," or rights to government help. This view is tangled in a massive confusion, and for one simple reason: The so-called negative rights are rights to government help, too.
To see the problem, begin with the two foundations of a market economy: private property and freedom of contract. Neither of these can be guaranteed by laissez-faire, because both require government assistance. Private property depends on property rights, which do not exist without government and law. Roosevelt himself made the point as early as 1932, asserting "that the exercise of . . . property rights might so interfere with the rights of the individual that the government, without whose assistance the property rights could not exist, must intervene, not to destroy individualism but to protect it" (emphasis added).
In fact, the government is "implicated" in everything people own. If rich people have a great deal of wealth, it is because the government furnishes a system in which they are entitled to have and to keep that wealth. When a company owns a broadcasting station or a series of broadcasting stations, this is possible only because the government creates a right of ownership and is prepared to back up that right with the law. People work very hard for what they earn. But without government, people would face a free-for-all, a kind of test of strength. Who knows what would emerge from that test? The people who most loudly object to "government intervention" depend on it every day of every year; they have the most to lose if government really got "off their backs." Once these points are understood, it becomes impossible to oppose the Second Bill on the ground that rights are properly limited to protection "against" government. Even for those who reject the Second Bill, freedom requires government's presence, not absence.
Many people might acknowledge this point but object to social and economic rights on pragmatic grounds. They might fear that the Second Bill would destroy people's incentives and reward sloth. Perhaps the Second Bill would give citizens an unhealthy and even destructive sense of entitlement -- a belief that whatever they do, the state owes them the material preconditions for a decent life. But this was not Roosevelt's goal. He did not say that people should be given resources if they were able-bodied but refused to work. It was only when opportunity was not enough that Roosevelt argued for minimal guarantees as a matter of basic justice. |
