Hijacking Rights

[Geee]

American Thinker:

America has been turned upside down.The concepts of rights, money and morality have been hijacked. The causes of our intellectual, financial and moral bankruptcies have been underway for a long time.

First hijacked was the concept of rights. The original Founders' concepts of rights were strictly political rights. They were a moral concept of enabling individual freedom of action in a social context. Our founding documents protected our natural right to our own life, the right to be left alone, to be free to act without asking for permission, and to be free from the force of others. Included in these rights were property rights. They were not the right to goods but the right to pursue goods through your own individual action. There was no guarantee that you would earn any property but if you did earn it, you would own it.

The hijacking of the concept of rights began with FDR with a moral claim of "Economic Rights". The 1960 Democratic convention made the agenda explicit, including "rights" to: a job, a fair wage, a decent home, medical care, protection from economic fears in old age, sickness, accident, or unemployment, and a good education. As discussed in Ayn Rand's Man's Rights, there is no such thing as an economic right. The granting of economic rights to one group requires the taking rights away from another group. Any alleged right of one man that violates the rights of another cannot be a right. There is no such thing as the right to enslave. Yet, the concept of economic rights has been accepted by our culture and both political parties. The only legitimate economic right which is really a political right is the right to free trade.