Human rights, limited government, and capitalism.

• Author: Weede, Erich

By and large, there are two distinct intellectual traditions in social theorizing. One is normative. It addresses how people should live or how the social order should be arranged. Much of the human fights discourse belongs to this tradition. The other tradition attempts to analyze the world as it is. Within this second tradition theories are evaluated according to criteria such as falsifiability, compatibility with known facts, explanatory power, or predictive value. If one is interested in feasibility, and if one links fights with corresponding obligations, then the separation between these intellectual traditions is regrettable. Then it makes little sense to generate long lists of human rights without knowing whether or not they ever can be implemented.

In this article, I argue that a short list of merely "negative" or protective human rights, which can be implemented, is preferable to a long list of "negative" and "positive" or entitlement fights, because the fulfillment of the latter requires an infringement of the former. Indeed, only a narrow focus on negative rights is compatible with a free economy, which alone provides the means to fund the material well-being of the masses the objective of positive fights. Funding entitlements, however, undermines the viability of a free economy and thus appears self-destructive.

Human Rights

In the summer of 2007, the British government insisted that the European Charter of Fundamental Rights, which includes a long list of social rights and was originally intended to become a part of the aborted European Constitution, should have no legal force in the United Kingdom. Although it looks strange that one of the oldest and most stable democracies in Europe should be against better guarantees for human rights, the British position might be more reasonable than the French or German positions with their misplaced pride in the underperforming European social model.

One may distinguish between two kinds of human rights. On the one hand, there are negative or protective rights. On the other hand, there are positive rights or entitlements. Admittedly this classification is not exhaustive. Some very important political rights cannot easily be classified as either negative or positive. The prime example is the right to vote. By and large, it is a positive right and it might contribute to the expansion of other positive fights. But the right to vote may also be used to protect negative rights and to throw socialists out of office.

According to Bueno de Mesquita et al. (2005), broad-based political participation and party competition come close to being prerequisites for governments respecting personal integrity fights. Low levels of democracy do not suffice to improve human rights practice. The ambivalence of the right to vote in my classification makes me neglect this particular right in this article. Without desiring to recommend an alternative political arrangement, I share the scepticism of those writers who see some connection between the vote and the subsequent right for popularity and redistribution (de Jasay 1985) or who emphasize the need to add constitutional limits to electoral democracy. According to Buchanan (1993: 59),

Private or several property serves as a guarantor of liberty, quite independently of how political or collective decisions are made. The direct implication is, of course, that effective constitutional limits must be present, limits that will effectively constrain overt political intrusions into rights of property, as legally defined, and into voluntary contractual arrangements involving transfer of property. If individual liberty is to be protected, such constitutional limits must be in place prior to and separately from any exercise of democratic governance.... The tyranny of the majority is no less real than any other, and, indeed, it may be more dangerous because it feeds on the idealistic illusion that participation is all that matters. Negative Rights

Negative rights serve to protect the individual, his liberty, and his property from coercion and violence. Negative rights prevent others from undertaking some types of actions, but they do not oblige others to help one. In order to safeguard negative rights government has to be limited. The link between negative rights and limited government was already well understood long before the term "human rights" gained currency. In the late 17th century, Locke ([1690] 2003: 161, 189) wrote:

The supreme power cannot take from any man part of his property without his own consent: for the preservation of property being the end of government ... wherever the power, that is put in any hands for the government of the people, and the preservation of their properties, is applied to other ends, and made use of to impoverish, harass, or subdue them into arbitrary and irregular commands of those that have it; there it presently becomes tyranny, whether those that thus use it are one or many. The right to life certainly is a fundamental human right. It is a negative right since it only requires that others do not kill one. In this context, one should recall that about 169 million people have been killed by states or their governments in the 20th century (Rummel 1994). Communists and National Socialists established the most murderous regimes. Among the victims of communism, there are tens of millions of deaths from starvation after the coerced collectivization of agriculture in Stalin's Soviet Union or Mao's China. Although the 20th century suffered two world wars and other bloody wars, fewer people died on the battlefield or because of bombing campaigns than have been murdered or starved to death by their own governments. Whoever wants to protect human rights should therefore first of all focus on the necessity of protecting people from the state and its abuses of power.

Positive Rights

Positive rights or entitlements commit the state and its officials to undertake certain types of action--for example, to guarantee certain minimal standards of material well-being. The American Bill of Rights (1789) is limited to negative or protective rights, while the United Nations General Declaration of Human Rights (1948) and the European Union Charter of Fundamental Rights (2000) encompass both protective rights and entitlements. (1) The trend from short lists of negative rights to long lists of negative and positive rights has been accompanied by a rapid and sustained increase in public spending in the West (Tanzi and Schuknecht 2000).

Classical liberals, in contrast to people called "liberals" in 20th century America and "social democrats" in Europe, demanded the primacy of individual liberty and thereby of protective rights and limited government. Providing people with entitlements forces the state to curtail the negative rights and liberties of individuals. In order to fund entitlements the state has to tax (i.e., to take coercively from) some people in order to provide for others. Entitlements have to rest on coercion and redistribution--that is, on a greater restriction of negative rights or individual liberty than would otherwise be necessary. As the balance of achievements and victims of communism demonstrates, the attempt to provide entitlements did not prevent tens of millions of deaths from starvation. Actually, the attempt to provide more than negative rights resulted in something less: the lack of respect of negative and positive rights. As I shall argue, this association between the attempt to guarantee entitlements by a monopoly of coercion and central planning is causally related to the repeated failure to protect even the right to life.

Philosophical Principles and Empirical Analysis

In the classical liberal tradition, liberty and property rights cannot be separated; they belong together. This tradition includes the English philosopher John Locke ([1690] 2003), the American Bill of Rights, the Nobel laureate Friedrich Hayek (1960, 1976), and contemporary libertarians like Murray Rothbard (1980). The concept of self-ownership clarifies the intimate connection between liberty and property. Ownership of the fruits of one's labor is derived from self-ownership.

According to Locke ([1690] 2003: 111), "Every man has a property in his own person: this nobody has any right to but himself. The labour of his body, and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his." Whether one should accept Locke's theory about the legitimate acquisition of land by actually cultivating it, need not concern us here. Since one has to leave "enough, and as good" (Locke [1690] 2003: 114) for others, there might be problems with Locke's approach. Most of contemporary taxation in developed countries, however, is hardly related to land ownership, but strongly related to returns on diligence, hard work, and human capital. Besides, it has been questioned...