Dear Friends,
It seems to me that any Constitution that is a list of “positive rights” is nothing more than Slave Papers. Such Constitutions require that one group/faction is entitled to the labor of another group/faction. No matter if, the group/faction that is entitled, is the aristocracy, or the tyranny of the proletariat (as embodied in the person of one man), it has many pernicious effects on society and the market system.
We always see these types of constitutions in countries that are sliding quickly to socialism/communism. The same communism that has led to bloodshed every single time it has been implemented. That is because socialistic thinking is incompatible with a functional market system. It is and was intended to supplant the market system as the dominant doctrine on the means of production. As such it requires the execution of, clergy and capitalists, and the reeducation of the masses of people.
Constitutions that list positive rights are a tool, a means to an end, of the socialist/communist/progressive. This tool is to undermine the market system by poisoning the supply of workers. The poison is an attitude of entitlement. This attitude of entitlement is fostered and husbanded by the socialist by such tools. Like a gardener needs a hoe to weed the ground around his seedlings.
Another, maybe the most pernicious, is that such Constitutions create the environment for oligarchal capitalism to appear. Such capitalism is a form of Stupid Capitalism. Under this type of system the regulation in a country is set up so that the families in power are the only people with access to permits, capital, squishy regulation, and other benefits not available to the people at large. This allows a small group of Elite in a country to amass extreme power and wealth that is mirrored by the extreme poverty in the masses such a system creates.
This is another reason the socialist/progressive love positive rights, it undermines the market system in a way that the ignorant can be misled to believe is a fault of the market instead of the poison introduced into the market. The socialist/communist points at the extreme gap, in such a country, between the rich and the poor and claim it is the fault of capitalism! When they have misled in at least two ways.
One is that they are using a faulty metric to measure the justice of a system The fault is that they are measuring the gap between the rich and the poor. Think about the margins on a page. How far they are apart is not as important as how close to the left edge, (if we consider that the side of absolute poverty), the left margin is set. If we set them too close together we loose the ability to do productive work.
So the real measure is the distance from the left edge to the margin. Moreover, the margin if you will, should be set by the aggregate decisions of the people at large not by government. Whenever government intercedes in such fundamental properties of the market it has created imbalances in the markets, such as rent controls, price controls, and the like. But despite using a flawed metric they come up with the right answer.
The other is that by using a faulty means of getting the right answer they can create profound anger that can in fact lead to revolution. They infiltrate the people and sow the seeds of anger. The communist/socialist can then use the conditions they created, with their Constitution of positive rights, to overthrow the government and any market system in that country. If your timeline is generations it is as elegant as it is evil.
We all know the history of Communist tyrannies. They have visited the greatest horrors on Mankind to date. Over 120,000,000 people, just like you and I, murdered by Communists, in the most horrible ways possible. Yet today’s Communist is not even the least bit recalcitrant. No today’s Communists claim the same mantle of ruthlessness as their predecessors.
But if the End is a democratic republic the only means, that has been devised to date, is the market system. A functional productive, lightly regulated market system where every person has access to and no one is excluded the means of production. With all the trappings of a functional market system like the protection of private property, both real and chattel, free hold land rights and personal protection from unreasonable searches and seizures. The list can be discerned in the US Constitution…
As I have said before, a market system can exist under both tyranny and liberty but communism/socialism/progressivism can only exist under tyranny. So if you want liberty, first you must have a market system, then liberty can follow. To have a functional market system you must allow everyone to participate and let there be class mobility. Because in the end it is class mobility that is really destroyed by the introduction of “positive rights.”
Class Mobility being a meta attribute of a functional market system. It must be encouraged and husbanded by a Constitution so that entrepreneurialism can prosper. Even though the Elite despise class mobility and the poor are kept ignorant of it…
