Recently [this was in 2005] a web standards mailing list, in the course of a post on “accessibility” someone wrote:
“I don’t think anyone here would disagree that the equitable delivery of and access to information and education is every persons right.”
Effectively this makes the concept of “accessibility” not a technical issue but a political one. I posted to the group: “I disagree. I’m pretty sure this is not the forum for this topic though.”
A few people privately emailed me to ask me to explain, here’s my response.
To say we have a right to something is to make a very specific and serious claim, namely that the government should use it’s power of coercion to enforce those rights.
To be clear, government is the agency for the protection of rights through its powers of enforcement, essentially it is the power of (legal) coercion. However it is just a group of individuals like us, they have no special insight into the truth, or powers to magically create goods and services out of thin air. A proper government is just our collective right to self-defense, it has no right to do anything that isn’t inherent in us as individuals.
As individuals we have the right to our own lives, and to be free to take the actions necessary to sustain and protect them. Rights are rights to freedom of action not rights to goods or services produced by others. Free speech is the right to act, to speak, write, produce art, etc., without being forcibly stopped by others. It is not the right to a newspaper column, a microphone or a website. Likewise, we have the right to seek a job, to contract with with an employer and to subscribe to internet services, etc. We do not have a right to a job or to broadband access per se. These are goods that are dependent on the labor of others. We cannot have a right to their labor as that would be slavery and it would make the very concept of rights incoherent. It would mean we’d have the “right” to force them to serve our needs, i.e., the right to violate rights.
I don’t deny that these things might be desirable, valuable or good, in the right context, but that does not mean we have a right to them. These things don’t grow on trees, they’re produced by individuals. As such we should trade for them, voluntarily exchange our values for those produced by others. Force and slavery have no place in a moral, civilized society. That’s precisely why government exists, to protect us from physical coercion. “Entitlement rights,” right to things, necessitate that government becomes an agent of coercion, a destroyer of rights, the logical outcome of which is everyone is enslaved to serve the needs of everyone else.
Recommended Reading
- “The Nature of Government”, Capitalism the Unknown Ideal, Ayn Rand
- The Law, Frederick Bastiat
This entry was posted on Thursday, November 24th, 2005 at 11:00 am and is filed under Web, Ideas. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
