Introduction to Radical Capitalism - Part III

http://zambia.co.zm/articles/radical_capitalism3.html

There are so many people today who just invoke arbitrary rights without such recourse to logic and reality, which is why we have great confusion in society today, with rights being randomly granted to anything, from animals to trees to God and to just about anything else. Without integrating the factors that make the whole concept of rights viable, such irrational arbitrariness is inevitable.

In our upcoming constitution, we can already see this evidence of divorcing rights from an irrefutable foundation (property rights) which can be derived from common sense, as we have shown. We have had people suggesting all kinds of special rights based purely on their feelings of sympathy. Thus we are going to have special rights for the poor people, for example, which government will be obliged to meet by forcefully taking some property from those who are less poor.

There are no special rights that anyone can claim. Every human being has certain inalienable rights and these are built on the foundation of the principle of property ownership and not on whim or sympathy. This is why the dichotomy of “individual rights versus societal rights” is a false one based on a similarly false reification of society. And it is why the acceptance of property rights leads logically to the absolute acceptance of capitalism and the absolute rejection of socialism and all its variant or resultant forms that reject the sovereignty of the individual in his own life and over his own property (communism, fascism, etc).

This is currently the last of the series - I truly hope Mr. Chisala will continue this particular series of essays, as I have found them very approachable and useful in sharing with people who are misinformed about Capitalism. Chanda brings up the issue of rights in this essay - a crucial topic for any debate on government and the philosophical basis for any moral society. He demonstrates the relationship between rights and property, and shows how a philosophy's definition of rights shapes its entire societal system.