Posted on 04/06/2022 8:46:39 PM PDT by libertasbella
The difference between negative vs positive rights is that one requires action while the other requires inaction. Negative rights are the requirements of someone else not to interfere in your ability to obtain something. Positive rights are a requirement of someone else to provide you with something.
You may hear negative rights referred to as “liberties,” and that’s because they are basic human and civil rights stating that no one can interfere with our right to obtain something through trade or bartering.
Positive rights are often called “entitlements” because they are things that someone must provide to us, whether we’ve earned them or not. We don’t have to do anything to obtain positive rights; they’re granted to us.
Hearing Ebola talking about negative rights, which I’m sure he did to subtly disparage them, always grated on my ears.
When Scrooge learned the lesson that humanity was his own look out a careful reading may reveal that part of his resentment towards those who ran professional (for the Victorian era) programs to deal with the poor isn’t so much that they came around at all but the frequency at which they came around.
I will submit to you the possibility that Scrooge was not meant to be an especially bad Victorian but a somewhat ordinary one, if on the stingy side, one that held that looking after their fellow man was a job for those whose job it was, for professionals.
Scrooge had apparently done his bit, at some prior point, and had his pockets picked.
What Scrooge had to learn is that it was his own lookout.
But with the mindset associated with “positive rights”, with entitlements, the professionals now manage kinder and gentler public programs and given the nature of the evidence laid before Scrooge should we expect him to learn his lesson in our times or retain his belief that it’s best left to the professionals with their vast tax funded resources and bureaucratic manpower?
“Entitlements”, where giving is mandatory and everyone is made to give at the office from their wages, is a through the looking glass arrangement to what Dicken’s wrote against ... yet at its core the very same.
Early so-called “progressives” and socialists railed against the inadequacy of charity ... but they never admitted what would be adequate. Do government goodies support all needs? Certainly not, nor could they!
But government handouts are supported involuntarily, under threat of the laws, and that is their “adequacy”.
It was that charity is voluntary that made it inadequate.
Positive rights require force, they require confiscation ... they also require men to ultimately not consider humanity to be their own lookout but the domain of professionals, often far off and removed from both those they take from and give to.
Good subject for discussion, I have always viewed this as a cleavage point between conservatives and Leftists. And it is non-negotiable.
We are for negative rights and all that springs from that.
The other unique way of viewing the differences between most european law and us law was:
In america, if it wasn’t explicitly forbidden, it was allowed.
In europe, if it wasn’t explicitly allowed, it was forbidden.
Positive rights is slavery. A slave must provide a positive right.
Indeed, it goes deeper.
The US Constitution explicitly forbids powers to the federal that are not expressly allowed.
The constitution of the first French Republic only defines the responsibilities of the government and allowed ordinary politics to determine how those would be achieved.
The so-called “progressives”, the early ones and not their modern counterpoints, wanted America to have something more French, essentially, and were opposed to the Constitution.
But if the government is free ultimately the people serve it, and are in bondage to it and political fashion.
True. I was more focused on the legal systems of each on a general differece level, not really on their zyzte, of government documents.
The way i sum up the differences between most european governments and american government was:
In america, the constitution constrained government with limited powers derived from the states and the people, ie the us constitution limits what government can do
In most european forms of government, power resides with the government, and their constitutions limit what the people can do
Unfortunately, and ominously, I have found myself using it most often in the context of laws on the books being broken with impunity with no punishment forthcoming, as happens in black/illegal immigrant crime, money laundering to enrich politicians, surveillance violations, etc.
I should re-word it: What is forbidden and not punished is allowed.
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I’ve occasionally pointed out that the 9th Amendment / A4:S2:C1 perform the same function at the French document called (in English) The Rights of Man.
You see, the French Revolution was, as has been every upheaval since in its mold, in no small measure about having the Administrative Law form of laws in the place of any common law ... where the American Revolution in the DoI expressly states that keeping the free system of English laws as it was known at the time, English Common Law, was a central reason for independence.
The difference is everything.
Under Administrative Laws there is nothing but the political, there are no unalienable rights at all, and no civil rights unless they are granted by the Sovereign State to the people. As the French Revolution rejected any previously known basis for civil rights they needed to state in writing and at length what should be the rights of men ... but as the Privileges and Immunities (as they existed under common law and the several States that Ratified the Constitution)of the American citizen were well understood there was no need to enumerate them just to form a government.
You may also note that it is entirely consistent for a government that gives rights to be able to simply take them away, thus every terror from the Terrors to the Holocaust to the various gulag states ... all cut from the same mold.
Well said.
The other day a referee dared call a penalty for traveling and for his trouble he got attacked by the players.
I have to say, it was a little disturbing to me to realize the context I have had to primarily use this statement in lately.
As you showed, illegality is being normalized. Given how things are, that may be no accident.
Aside: I don’t really watch basketball, not for years, so it recently came as a surprise that they no longer enforce rules on traveling. Ruined a joke where, in this one sports arena built on the US - Canada border, they would call people for illegal international travel.
LOL, no such thing anymore as “Illegal International Travel”! At least not in the USA...:(
Right.
The american revolution ushered in a constitutional republic. The french revolution ushered in a democracy.
In a crude simile, one is rule of law, one is mob rule, or if you don’t like that, rule of whatever we think works at the moment.
Rule by what justices without accountability pull out of their asses.
If, as per Marshall, it is worse than a solemn mockery to require Justices to take an oath of office to uphold the Constitution and yet make them turn a blind eye to it and only see statutes then what is it to require others in other branches of government to take the same oath but then make them ignore the Constitution and only see the opinions of the Court?
People who insist the USA is just Europe 2.0 always overlook this.
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