Human rights are easy

For me the definition of human rights is simple:

You have a right to be human

Human beings are born kicking and screaming and alive. This pretty much defines it to me:

1. a right to be alive (no one has the right to your life)
2. a right to say what we want (free speech)
3. a right to think what we want (no one can tell you what to think)
4. a right to do what we want (no one can tell you what to do)
5. a right for what is ours (eg. property rights)

The only of these rights that can and should be limited by negative rights is number 4. This should only be limited by the way that we do not have the right to limit any of the other rights from anyone else.

These for me are the fundamental human rights. They don’t need to get more complex than this.

Why not add more rights?

Where the complexity happens is when people first start enumerating specific rights beyond these. For example we do have the right to do what we want, this is not a privilege but a right. We do not have to list all of the things we have a right to do.

In some ways this is probably the failing of the generally speaking excellent bill of rights in the US constitution. It enumerates too many things thus removing focus from the fact that the founding fathers undoubtedly did not mean to disallow anything that is not specifically mentioned in the bill of rights.

A typical phrase you often hear repeated in the US is “Driving is not a right it is a privilege”. That is in fact not true. You have a right to do whatever you please as long as you do not specifically go and harm other people. Thus you have a right to drive, but not a right to drive irresponsibly.

Where governments come in is that they are there to protect the above rights. No more no less. They are also bound by these human rights or they by default go against the above mentioned human rights.

Where big government comes in is when they start adding other jobs for them selves. Such as a right to education, right to food, right to a job etc. These are the so called positive rights and essentially entail that you have the right to certain things from another party (the government). These sound great and voters tend to really like them. But they differ in so many ways from the fundamental human rights and can not realistic be enforced without seriously limiting the fundamental human rights. Thus positive human rights are bad.

Minimize conflicts between rights

Really it is much better to forget about government when thinking about fundamental human rights. When you do that everything is so much simpler. You will also find that there is very little conflict between the rights.

As I said the only real conflict that exists in the above rights is your right to do what you want. eg.

• You can say what you want, but you can NOT force someone to listen to you.
• You can not do anything that breaks the first right for anyone else. This would be murder.
• You can not tell someone else what to do as that would be slavery.
• You can not take your neighbors car. The car is his. If you take it it is theft.

You start getting way more complex conflicts if you add all the positive rights to your list. Such as a right to a job. If you have to have a right to a job this will most likely affect the right of someone else.

For example if the government decides it will serve this right by hiring you then this has to be financed by infringing on the property rights of something. If the government decides that it would rather tell private business to hire someone it infringes on at least private business right to do what they want ( but likely also their property rights). As you can see, things start getting complex. It’s much better to keep things simple. These are actually both typical examples of government policy in countries with “positive rights” in their constitution.