2/2000

So often I have had to suffer the rhetoric of human rights whether it be on TV while I am trying to find something worth watching, in school, online or from other people. Human Rights are no doubt very important and being a moderate libertarian I agree whole heartedly that countries with governments as corrupt and despotic as China's something must be done to protect the people. However the reality of the human rights movement is very different.

In many cases those who scream the loudest about human rights are the very ones who once in power would take them away and for all intents and purposes enslave the people. Whether they are socialist or communists matters not for the outcome is the same: the nation's economy and middle and upper classes are destroyed and the lower class becomes a slave class. In the name of humanity they trample the rights most precious to humanity: the right to be free from oppression (corporate AND government), the right to speak one's mind without fear of censorship, the right to arm oneself for protection, the right to live free of fear, the right to be rich, poor or somewhere in-between and most of important, the right to determine one's own destiny. Ultimately those who live under the tyranny of socialist and communist regimes suffer the most dehumanizing horrors that mankind is capable of producing.

Human rights are not unlimited however. Having food, clothing, shelter, Medicare, daycare for your kid and other such things are not rights. Socialists often trumpet things like socialized medical care saying that people of a god given right to be free of disease and be healthy. However I disagree. It soon becomes a question of what else will be socialized. Where will they stop? Will they move on to socialized housing and transportation? What more will the government take over from the private sector that it should be involved with? The more involved the government becomes the daily lives of people the more it takes away the desire and energy needed to innovate. That is why communist and socialist nations typically lag so far behind their capitalist counterparts. In a capitalist nation people are able to make money off of the things that they create, and greed is a necessary evil because it can be harnessed to provide the motivation to push the people of a nation forward. By socializing broad systems like medical care, the government is in essence robbing the people especially the working class of the competition that has made the American medical care system so competent and cheap.

What is perhaps the most overlooked human right is the right to be able to arm oneself with a weapon such as a firearm for the purpose of protection. It is naive to think that police can protect the people better than an armed populace. The police are unable to be everywhere that they are needed. By arming a population, criminals will be much less likely to commit crimes because of the fear of attacking an armed victim. However in the cries for freedom of speech, this right is often not given any thought. The truth of the matter is that firearms and other weapons are what protect free speech. A government governing an armed populace will be much more reluctant to censor or even act like it will censor something out of fear of armed revolt. An armed populace is also able to resist tyrants, though some will question the possibility that a few rag tag fighters with assault rifles taking on a powerful could win, one need only look at organizations such as the IRA to see how effective they can be. If a populace is disarmed by the government, then there would be absolutely nothing short of an invasion from other another country stopping the government from terrorizing its people.

The right to be free from oppression whether the source of the oppression be from a corporation or a government is one of the most overlooked human rights. Many human rights activists being socialists believe that the private sector is the primary source of oppression and that blame capitalism for the "oppression" that the working class has supposedly had to endure. However most socialist governments are highly oppressive because they do not respect the rights of the people and take away their right to be economically independent. The private sector however is rarely the source of oppression in a first world nation like the US or Canada. In such a nation, there are laws to protect both the workers and the consumers. However in 2nd and 3rd world nations there are not. Because the governments of many such nations haven't established legal protection for labor unions and minimum wage laws, it is the government that is at fault, not the businesses. It is also not the government's right to take away the ability of someone to become rich, poor or comfortably in between. Poor is also a relative definition as to some it means people living on the edge of homelessness and to others it means anyone in the working class.