tell me about "rights" once you've fed everyone
I was at my GLBT student group's candidate forum last night and mostly Libertarians showed up. *le sigh* There were a lot of lofty ideological statements that were often internally inconsistent, and universally impractical. My favorite part was when I asked about preventing discrimination and ensuring that the needs of minorities and the underprivileged are met in a capitalist utopia. After a diatribe from the nuttiest of the gang about how the two party system discriminates against him (poor well-off white man that he is), someone finally talked about the real issue and gave the tired argument about "negative vs. positive rights. I'd like to say a few things about that.
Positive rights are the ones like "right to health care" and "right to work" where we're dealing with people actually _getting_ the things they need or deserve. Negative rights deal more with protection like "right to not be murdered" or "right to not be unfairly jailed." Never mind that most of this seems to be semantic nit-picking. The libertarians will often tell you that only negative rights are valid, and I'm going to continue calling bullshit on this until they violate my right to not be attacked by a capitalist nutcase.
The biggest issue with this kind of argument is that it implicitly says that the rich and privileged have more rights than the poor and underrepresented. If you're John McCain, the right not to have your house taken from you is 8 times more useful than it is for a middle class family with 1 home and infinitely more useful than it is to a person living on the streets. Likewise, the right not to be physically attacked is awesome for someone with health care and access to good nutrition who is in good health, but isn't all that helpful to people dying of diseases we've already got got cures for but refuse to provide them with. Most of the responses you'll get when you bring this off remind me of fiery Baptist sermons.
Along the same lines, handling discrimination based on these ideas is disproportionately shitty for minorities. Libertarians always say that you can fight discrimination by "voting with your dollar," but how can that be at all effective if there are fewer of you and/or you have fewer dollars? Mind you, majority rule suffers form the same issue here. There have to be structures in place to ensure fairness and that the needs of everyone are met, regardless of these bullshit ideological arguments about "natural rights" to property and to not ever have to give back to the community. For more on how systems that don't privilege the rich or the majority can work, look further into the work of any of these amazing people, especially the writings of the bearded gentleman on the right.
