Treatise III: The Extent of Rights and One’s Legitimate Concerns
Every human being owns his or her own body and the rights that logically arise from this fact are clear, but finite. No one can claim a right that in any way interferes with an individual’s objective right to self-ownership and to own property – not even if a majority of one’s neighbors are in agreement.
It’s popular to assert that all humans have a “right” to food. This then implies that all humans have a right to have someone else gather or otherwise furnish food for them, which would then violate the objective right of self-ownership of the people who are having to labor to furnish all this food that is suddenly everyone’s “right” to have. This is clearly contradictory and nonsensical.
All humans have a right to eat, they have a right to labor to improve property that will then grow food, or to labor and receive a wage or to barter for food. No one has a right to force anyone else to perform labor on their behalf, be it in raising food, providing education, drawing water, or providing medical care. No one has a legitimate claim to the labor or property owned by someone else.
Where there is no force, however, there is no violation of one’s right of self-ownership. It’s popular to assert that capitalism is slavery as it forces people to work in order to buy things needed to live. This childish belief ignores the fact that work is going to have to be performed by someone if anyone is going to expect to eat; crops don’t grow themselves, livestock doesn’t raise and butcher itself, etc. It is because of the voluntary division of labor that each individual doesn’t have to grow their own food, build their own smartphones and construct their own automobiles.
In the USA, few are really forced into any job, they’re free to leave at any time. That doing so is a risk, and risk makes many people uncomfortable, and discomfort tends to lead to inaction, doesn’t amount to an individual being “forced” to stay at a job they hate, no matter how “trapped” they might feel. After all, on the first day of that lousy job, the person working it agreed to the terms and signed up.
Related to the understanding of what is a right and what isn’t, and what is force and what isn’t, is the knowledge of what the limits of one’s legitimate concerns are; what we call one’s “business.”
Too often we rail against people expressing themselves in ways we don’t like for whatever reason when whatever it is they’re doing doesn’t actually damage our person or our property. This is always problematic because each individual’s legitimate concerns end at the edge of their property line. A person is free to dislike homosexuality because of some religious belief or another, he’s just not free to interfere with what his gay neighbors are doing on their own property when it is causing him no damage.
A person is free to dislike firearms and therefore choose not to own any. They are not free to dictate in any way what firearms their neighbor may choose to own when him simply possessing them causes harm to no one else’s person or property.
A person is free to dislike cocaine and therefore choose not to use it. That person has no right to interfere with their neighbor who likes to use cocaine and harm no one else’s person or property in the process.
A person is free to dislike prostitution and therefore never solicit a hooker. That person has no right to demand an armed gang prevent his neighbor from bringing home a different hooker every night.
A person is free to dislike non-Muslims. That person has no right to execute a plot to fly airliners full of passengers into occupied buildings as an expression of this dislike.
A person is free to identify as whatever gender or sex or combination thereof they choose. No person has a right to force a private business owner to allow them to do anything on that business owner’s property that said business owner has chosen to disallow.
A person has a right to find far-right-wing speech terribly offensive. That person has no right to damage property or assault people because of the fact they’re offended.
The extent of one’s legitimate concerns, one’s “business,” is always at the end of their own property line. If another’s actions aren’t actively causing your person or your property harm (feels don’t count), you don’t have a legitimate complaint against them and are likely just being a busybody – and no one likes a busybody.
That the state constantly oversteps and declares “rights” that infringe upon individual self-ownership doesn’t negate that right philosophically, just physically based on the threat of violence. To misconstrue this as being somehow legitimate and to mistake, say, healthcare for being a right, is to decide that “might makes right.” Sadly, most Americans do just that, so long as they think they’ll benefit from the redistribution of the stolen property.
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