Re: The Heritage Foundation – 7/24/2008 – “Economic Freedom as a Human Right” – Kim Holmes

While I have no problem with Holmes’ view on the importance of economic freedom, I take issue with the claim that economic freedom is a human right of the same sort as freedom of speech.

Here I will use the terms natural rights and civil rights as in BreakPoint – 8/1/2008 – “A Civil Right to Gay Marriage” – Regis Nicoll, where natural rights are basic human rights and civil rights are privileges granted by governments. These two sets of rights are disjoint and together span the space of all rights.

One might argue that natural rights are beyond limitation by government or any other power save the individual who possesses such rights. But it is generally accepted by those who see freedom of speech a natural right that neither perjury, nor malicious statements known to be false, nor symbolic actions that hurt others (like burning down someone’s house as a symbolic act of disagreeing with their politics) are valid expressions of freedom of speech. And it is generally accepted among those who see freedom of religion a natural right that religiously motivated involuntary human sacrifice or the physical punishment of those who defame your religion by believing otherwise are not valid expressions of religious freedom. Government cannot create natural rights (they can only create civil rights) but governments may limit specific actions as expressions of natural rights.

By economic freedom, I assume Holmes implies the right to acquire, use, and dispose of property as one sees fit. Property, however, is a different kind of entity than speech or religion.

The right to freedom of speech means freedom to all speech (except as restricted above) and the right to freedom of religion means the freedom to practice any religion or religions (except as restricted above). There can never be any confusion over the “ownership” of the speech in freedom of speech --- each individual possess the freedom of all their speech and never the freedom of someone else’s speech. Similarly, freedom of religion implies the freedom of any individual to practice the religion of their choice but not the freedom to force others to practice or not practice any religion.

One’s property rights, however, do not apply to all property but only to the specific property that by agreement within a society are subject to that person’s ownership. But questions of property ownership are not only possible but common because there is no self evident “natural” criterion by which ownership is established. For example, the land on which many of us live was acquired by treaty from the various Native American tribes by our government and sold or otherwise distributed to individuals, eventually arriving in our hands via transfer of ownership to us. But many of the provisions of consideration in the treaties were never honored by our government. Is a transfer of property contingent on consideration valid if the consideration was never produced? Do Native American tribes really still own the land in the parts of the US where the promises of treaties ceding title to the land were never properly honored? Such an argument over natural rights is hardly imaginable.

Summarizing:

 (1) Such rights as freedom of speech and freedom of religion are inclusive of all speech one may choose to make or any religion one may choose to practice, subject only to very few restrictions mainly but not exclusively aimed at protecting the rights of others from being infringed upon.

(2) Such rights as property rights are not only subject to the same types of restriction as freedom of speech and religion but are additionally severely limited to only the tiny subset of all property that is somehow properly described as belonging to the person (or specific association of persons) who are designated “owners” of the property. The criteria for defining just who owns property is not a self evident natural law --- the definition of that criteria is a function of government and/or the mutual agreement of parties involved in the transfer of property ownership. The complex criteria for establishing ownership is totally uncharacteristic of natural rights (where ownership is intuitively obvious) but is characteristic of civil rights

(3) Economic freedom, generally concerned with the methods of acquiring, using, and disposing of property as one sees fit is not a natural right but a civil right.

There are other arguments involving the differences between civil and natural rights. For example, natural rights are not transferrable between individuals (individuals have natural rights because of who they are whether or not they want those rights, but of course are always free not to execute their rights if they so wish) but civil rights may or may not be transferrable depending on the way in which government grants these rights.