Freedom Rights or Demand Rights

It Makes a World of Difference

Doctrines of human rights are wax noses.  They mean whatever the contextual culture says they should mean.  Firstly, human rights are of little relevance to human beings the state declares non-human.  Unborn babies, for example.  Gypsies and Jews, for another.  Post-aborted, but still living babies, for yet another. 

Moreover, the "right"--whatever it may be--is always defined by the particular dominant culture of the day.  Many have forgotten that a most fulsome declaration of human rights was found in the Soviet Constitution.  The unwritten sub-text was that all these rights derived from the people, which was to say the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, which was to say the Chairman of the Supreme Soviet and the President of the Communist Party.  The state defined conscience, religion, media, unions, and all things. Totalitarian human rights was the outcome.  

The more full and comprehensive the list of human rights, the more oppressive and intrusive and dictatorial the state becomes.
  The state is the enforcement agency not just to defend, but to enforce human rights.  Historically, evolving out of a Christian world-view, human rights were freedom rights--protection of individual liberties against the meretricious tyrannical grasp of governments.  As the list of human rights has inflated and grown, freedom rights have been superseded by demand rights: the right of citizens to demand things of others.  Such demands are inevitably sanctioned and enforced by government.  Freedom rights are few in number (life, liberty, conscience, speech,  etc).  Demand rights are unlimited in number (housing, health, education, welfare, respect, tolerance, employment, retirement, etc.)

Here is a classic tale of how the movement from freedom rights to demand rights has produced an endless increase of state power and (consequent) tyranny.

More than 30 human-rights-related conventions and protocols have been promulgated by the Council of Europe. The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) has strayed from its mission of safeguarding basic rights, which serve as a bulwark against the reemergence of European totalitarianism, by giving itself the authority to identify new rights and obligations nowhere to be found in the European Convention on Human Rights, adopted  in 1950. For instance, it has determined that the right to property protects welfare benefits, turning the concept of private property on its head. This means that austerity measures currently being carried out across Europe may run afoul of human rights. In fact, this was the message to Portugal from the Council of Europe’s human-rights commissioner in May of this year. The EU Charter on Fundamental Rights, adopted in 2000, protects not only freedoms but also things such as “the right to free placement services” and a “high level of consumer protection.”

The right to welfare benefits is a pure demand right.  Under its aegis, an individual can lawfully demand the government commit larceny and forcibly extract property from some and use it to bestow patronage upon others.  Tyrannical government grows apace.  The shapes are shifting increasingly to resemble the totalitarian Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. 

A people whose government rejects Almighty God will end up being ruled by a government acting as if it itself were god.  Expanding and "discovering" new human rights is one of the transition mechanisms of this disastrous devolution.