Fake "Rights"

“Rights,” as the term is used ideologically, are ultimately assertions of arbitrary authority by third parties to prescribe things that others have never agreed to.

The same principle is expressed when terms like “social responsibility” or “social contract” are used to describe what third parties want done, regardless of whether any others have agreed to do it.  Thus business is said to have a “social responsibility” to provide various benefits to various individuals or to society at large, regardless of whether or not those businesses have chosen to assume such a responsibility.  Nor are these responsibilities necessarily based on laws that have been enacted.  On the contrary, the asserted “responsibilities” are the basis for advocating the passing of such laws, even though the responsibilities have no basis themselves, other than the fact that third parties want them imposed.

The same principle can be seen in assertions of figurative “promises,” as in the title of “The Promise of American Life,” by Herbert Croly, the Progressive-era first editor of the “New Republic’” magazine.  These “promises” are found nowhere except in the desires of Herbert Croly and like-minded Progressives, including some a hundred years later.  Similarly with “contracts” that no one has signed or even seen.  Thus Social Security has been described as a “contract between generations” when, obviously, generations yet unborn could not have agreed to any such contract.

Legal obligations can of course be imposed on unborn generations, whether through Social Security or the national debt, but the argument is not about what is physically possible but what has any logical or empirical foundation.  To say that it has a moral foundation, without providing any specifics, is only to say that some people feel that way.  But there would be no issue in the first place unless other people felt differently.  Nor are the asserted “rights,” “social responsibilities,” or fictitious “contracts” or “promises” necessarily based on claims of demonstrable majorities favoring such things.  On the contrary, they are asserted as reasons why the majority or political leaders or the courts ought to impose what third parties want imposed.  They are arguments without arguments.

Thomas Sowell, Intellectuals and Society, p.158