Machan's Musings - Entitlements Versus Rights
by Tibor R. Machan
These days there is much consternation about entitlements. But what, exactly, are they?
Having title means that, within the law, one has come to own something—a home, a car, etc. To be entitled to something then means that one has a proper legal claim to it. Being entitled to a minimum wage, for example, means that when one works, the law will require one not to be paid less than that wage.
But does an entitlement signify a right? In a limited sense, yes—the legal authorities have established one’s legal right to whatever one is entitled to. So here "legal right" and "entitlement" amount to the same thing.
But in the American political tradition, the rights that legal authorities may affirm are limited by a system of basic, non-legal, natural individual rights. These are laid out in the Declaration of Independence.
Since, according to that statement of basic political principles, everyone has a basic right to his or her life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness, no entitlements may be established by law that violate these basic rights. So, for example, being entitled to a minimum wage is actually unjustified, even if the law affirms it, because it violates the rights of individuals to trade freely—one of the implications of their right to liberty. If people freely enter into an employment relationship that specifies certain work provided for a certain wage, this isn’t something the law may void, since it is their right to do so; the minimum wage law violates this right.
This simply shows that a great many entitlements actually violate basic rights—entitlements to health care (provided at others’ involuntary expense), to subsidies (again extracted form others without their free consent), to regulations imposed on professionals (coercing them to suffer a kind of prior restraint), etc. Nearly everything Franklin D. Roosevelt called a "right" amounts to such violation of basic individual rights, since to provide people with what he thought they were entitled or had a right to, the basic rights of others had to be violated.
Now there are those who believe that rights do not exist as a matter of our human nature but because governments grant them. This is what was believed of monarchies—it was held that kings are superior people who could, by God’s authority, grant or deny rights to others. Nowadays the story is that rights are granted by governments by means of the democratic method. So if, by this method, entitlements are established, then they do not violate basic rights.
But this is to get things completely backwards. You see, the democratic method itself rests on natural rights—no one had to grant us the right to be participants in the political process. Simply being human beings in our communities establishes this right. Otherwise the very right to take part in the democratic process—the right to vote, for example—would be vulnerable to being voided democratically.
So rights come before democracy, and they also limit democracy to certain issues on which voting is okay. But no one may vote to deprive others of their basic rights! (Indeed, that is what motivated the inclusion of the Bill of Rights in the U.S. Constitution!)
Natural individual rights are basic principles for organizing human community life. Legislation and the common law can elaborate them, apply them to novel areas. But it may never violate them. Sure, there is always the power to violate them—just as criminals might have the power to violate one’s rights in any number of ways. But it is wrong to do so, and having a great many people agree to something that is wrong does not make it right.
So, a great many entitlements people now have by law can be seen to be wrong whenever they involve the violation of our basic rights. Sadly, making such violations legal does encourage the unthinking belief that they are okay. It also encourages the populace to become dependent on government’s violation of our basic rights.
In time, however, it will become evident that this is a very bad development—for example, by the emergence of enormous deficits and police actions against innocent people who simply wish to hold on to what is theirs or do what they freely choose to do. And we are beginning to witness such developments around the country and the world.
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