Why the West Is Giving Up on Individual Rights
Individual rights originated in Western thinking. Today, it is the West that produces the ruling class that disdains individual rights and replaces them with collectivism.
Individual rights originated in Western thinking. Today, it is the West that produces the ruling class that disdains individual rights and replaces them with collectivism.
In publicly opposing apartheid, William H. Hutt saw how legal segregation kept black South Africans from pursuing legitimate economic goals. To Hutt, apartheid deprived people of equality of economic opportunity, which kept them in poverty.
Progressives claim that profits are an unjust transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich. In reality, entrepreneurs earn profits by directing resources from less valued to more valued uses to satisfy consumer needs.
After the Indochina War, Vietnam was one of the poorest countries in the world, but dramatic free-market reforms have made this formerly socialist country prosperous.
While chattel slavery exists in some parts of the world, it mostly has been abolished. Perhaps we should do the same thing to the state.
The enemies of individual liberty are numerous, from leftists who see freedom as interfering with the “positive freedoms” offered by the state to conservatives that believe too much freedom destroys community relationships.
Conservatives and utilitarian classical liberals support freedom of contract because they deem it "useful" to society. However, Murray Rothbard believed that contractual freedom should be based upon the natural right of self-ownership.
Individual rights originated in Western thinking. Today, it is the West that produces the ruling class that disdains individual rights and replaces them with collectivism.
While chattel slavery exists in some parts of the world, it mostly has been abolished. Perhaps we should do the same thing to the state.