If one wishes to advocate a free society – that is, capitalism – one must realize that its indispensable foundation is the principle of individual rights. If one wishes to uphold individual rights, one must realize that capitalism is the only system that can uphold and protect them.
[T]here is no such entity as “society,” since society is only a number of individual men...”
The United States [when it began] held that man’s life is his by right, (which means: by moral principle and by his nature), that a right is the property of an individual, that society as such has no rights, and that the only moral purpose of a government is the protection of individual rights.
The concept of a “right” pertains only to action – specifically, to freedom of action. It means freedom from physical compulsion, coercion or interference by other men.
[Thus] the right to property is a right to action...it is not the right to an object, but to the action and the consequences of producing or earning the object. It is not a guarantee that a man will earn any property, but only a guarantee that he will own it if he earns it.
The concept of individual rights is so new in human history that most men have not grasped it fully to this day… [S]ome men assert that rights are a gift of God – others, that rights are a gift of society. But, in fact, the source of rights is man’s nature.
Rights are conditions of existence required by man’s nature for his proper survival. If man is to live on earth, it is right for him to use his mind, it is right to act on his own free judgment, it is right to work for his values and to keep the product of his work.
The [American] Declaration of Independence laid down the principle that “to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men.” This provided the only valid justification of a government and defined its only proper purpose: to protect man’s rights by protecting him from physical violence.
A civilized society is one in which physical force is banned from human relationships – in which the government, acting as a policeman, may use force only in retaliation and only against those who initiate its use.
Any alleged “right” of one man, which necessitates the violation of the rights of another, is not and cannot be a right. No man can have a right to impose an unchosen obligation, an unrewarded duty or an involuntary servitude on another man. There can be no such thing as “the right to enslave.”
Observe, in this context, the intellectual precision of the Founding Fathers: they spoke of the right to the pursuit of happiness – not of the right to happiness. It means that a man has the right to take the actions he deems necessary to achieve his happiness; it does not mean that others must make him happy.
Any undertaking that involves more than one man, requires the voluntary consent of every participant. Every one of them has the right to make his own decision, but none has the right to force his decision on the others.
There is no such thing as “a right to a job” – there is only the right of free trade, that is: a man’s right to take a job if another man chooses to hire him. There is no “right to a home,” only the right of free trade: the right to build a home or to buy it.
There are no “rights” of special groups, there are no “rights of farmers, of workers, of businessmen, of employees, of employers, or the old, of the young, or the unborn.” There are only the Rights of Man – rights possessed by every individual man and by all men as individuals.
[R]ights are moral principles which define and protect a man’s freedom of action, but impose no obligations on other men.
Private citizens are not a threat to one another’s rights or freedoms. A private citizen who resorts to physical force and violates the rights of others is a criminal – and men have legal protection against him.
A government is the most dangerous threat to man’s rights... When unlimited and unrestricted by individual rights, a government is man’s deadliest enemy.
[T]here are, in fact, no “economic rights,” no “collective rights,” no “public-interest rights.” The term “individual rights” is a redundancy: there is no other kind of rights and no one else to possess them.
--from the essay Man’s Rights (April 1963), by Ayn Rand
I like seeing quotation marks when reading a quote. The bullet points are not appropriate.
ReplyDeleteUnknown -- Well, maybe I'll add in quotes, but maintain the bullet points. Almost always quotes DO feature quotation marks. But I think the title makes clear what the reader is reading. Everything written [except for the stuff in brackets] is exactly from Ayn Rand.
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