Professor Bainbridge has a piece on the difference between positive rights and negative rights. For Canadians, a worthwhile reminder that governments that purport to protect one’s “right” to employment, to health care, for example, provide them at a great cost to negative rights and personal liberty.
If the majority thinks all employees should be paid a living wage, the freedom of individual employees to take a lower wage and of individual employers to offer a lower wage is circumscribed. Again, we often see the same sort of disregard for private property and freedom of contract in nominal democracies as in totalitarian regimes.
Saskatchewan provides a recent example of the danger of postive rights governments – withdrawel of government “guaranteed” rights to health care in rural Saskatchewan.
In forcing a “right to health care”, the state has prohibited private providers from operating in the system. So, when the state decides that it cannot or will not provide service to a segment of the population, those citizens suddenly find that instead of having a “right” – their access to health care has been effectively prohibited by the same government that claims to guarantee it.
Beltway Traffic Jam
The Tuesday linkfest: Kathy Kinsley rounds up the Iraqi blogs. Kevin Aylward publicizes a celebrity cause we can all get behind. Kate McMillan has something…
Kate,
Funny how that works.
It’s amazing how blind people can be. Were living wages to be instituted–say $20k/yr–what incentive would anyone in the world be left with to work if they can’t get a job paying significantly more? If working 40hrs/week nets me $21k/yr, well why work 2000 hours to make an extra $1000 over what I could make sitting on the couch?
I say anyone in the world because everyone in the world would promptly find a way to make their way to the United States the day after a living wage was instituted.
It’s pure common sense–you don’t even have to have a jot of economics knowledge–but people just don’t see it.