No such thing as a right to happiness

HeroicLife — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 23:49:00 GMT

A recent court ruling awarded a father $11 million due to the "emotional distress" caused by Wesboro Baptist Church members who picketed his son's funeral. The defendant's attorney presented the case as an issue of free speech. While the ruling is a violation of rights, supporters of both sides demonstrate a misunderstanding of rights when they present the issue as a case of privacy versus freedom of speech. There is no such thing as a "right" to privacy, speech, or a certain emotional state. Much of the confusion over rights today is due to lack of understanding of property rights.

Most people understand that there is no absolute right to "happiness." Such a claim would mean that anyone could turn everyone around them into slaves by demanding their labor or property in order to be "happy." Rights define the actions men make take in a social context, but do not impose any obligation, except to respect the same rights of others. This is why the U.S. Declaration of Independence declares the right to the pursuit of happiness, not to happiness itself.

Despite this, democratic governments enforce a "right" to happiness through the formation of a contradictory set of "fundamental" rights. By "rights" they mean both freedom from coercion (negative rights), and "rights" to various goods and services, which are paid for by coercion (positive rights). To clarify: rights include the right to be free from coercion as well as the power to coerce others. Democracies hide this contradiction by the pretence that allowing citizens to participate in elections qualifies as consent to the coersion. In fact, elections only give individual voters a miniscule power to choose the people who decide who gets to rob whom. Democracies are a civil war in which votes are weapons, "positive rights" the cause and public property is often the battleground.

All "public" property ultimately benefits individuals. There is no such thing as a collective mind or a collective stomach. "Common services" like welfare, schools, and parks are consumed by the unemployed, students, and nature enthusiasts. In democratic societies, most of the debate over conflicting "rights" comes from attempts by groups with conflicting values to use the same public property. For example, the debate over prayer in schools exists only because public schools are used by people with conflicting religious beliefs. No such issue exists for private schools - parents simply send their children to schools whose teachings they find acceptable. The "right to privacy" was invented primarily because states started monitoring and interfering with the consensual behavior of adults. Likewise, the need to protect a right to speech is only necessary because people with conflicting values demand to use the same public spaces to express their ideas. Over time, the right to speech has come to mean not just the freedom to express ideas on publicly-owned property, but the power to regulate private property by forcing property owners to permit or forbid certain content. Controls on speech on private property include "equal time" requirements, censorship of "immoral" content by the FCC, campaign finance regulations, restrictions of commercial speech, and laws against "hate speech" and "hate crimes."

The solution to the morass of contradictory "rights" is to re-establish the principle of negative rights - that is, to define rights solely in terms of property rights (including ownership of one's own body.) For example, in the Wesboro Baptist case, the only relevant question should be - did the protester's actions constitute trespass? If the protesters were on cemetery grounds against the owner's wishes, or were shouting from a neighboring property, the issue can be handled as a case of simple trespass. However to criminalize merely putting someone in a state of "emotional distress" criminalizes any speech or action that might potentially offend someone. This is nothing less than a right to happiness - which means the right to use force against anyone to fulfill one's whims.

Radical Idealism : democracy, government

No such thing as a right to happiness