Freedom isn’t comfort.

Just One Man’s Opinion About Rights

These days, it’s common to hear people declare that healthcare is a human right, or that access to food, housing, and even internet should be guaranteed to everyone. The language of “rights” has expanded dramatically, often invoked to describe what people ought to have, rather than what they are inherently entitled to. But that shift isn’t just rhetorical—it’s ideological. And in my view, it’s dangerous.

Let me be clear: I’m not saying people don’t deserve compassion. I’m saying rights aren’t the same thing as moral duties. Rights have boundaries. They are not just noble ideas or lofty aspirations. A right, in any serious sense, must meet three basic criteria:

1. You are born with it.


2. You can exercise it without forcing others to act.


3. Its violation carries moral or legal consequences.



Rights Are Not Entitlements

Food, shelter, and healthcare are necessities, yes. But necessities are not rights. Every creature on Earth is born into a struggle for survival. Lions don’t have a right to gazelles. Wolves don’t have a right to shelter from the cold. They fight, adapt, suffer, and sometimes die. That is the nature of existence.

To say someone has a right to food or housing is to say someone else has a duty to provide it. And once a right demands the labor, property, or resources of another human being, it ceases to be a right and becomes a form of entitlement—an enforced dependency. That may be a political position, but it’s not a natural right.

Negative vs. Positive Rights

Philosophers distinguish between two kinds of rights:

Negative rights are freedoms from interference. These include the right to speak, to defend yourself, to own property, and to live your life free from coercion.

Positive rights are claims to goods or services. These require someone else to provide something for you.


Only negative rights can truly be considered natural rights. They don’t infringe on anyone else’s liberty. They require only that others leave you alone. Positive rights, by contrast, demand action from others—and in doing so, they limit the liberty of those who must provide them.

This view echoes John Locke, who argued that natural rights are rooted in self-ownership and extend to the labor and property one produces. Locke wrote, “Every man has a property in his own person. This nobody has any right to but himself.”

It also finds a historical ally in Frederick Douglass, who recognized that liberty meant more than safety or provision. Douglass said: “A man’s rights rest in three boxes: the ballot box, the jury box, and the cartridge box.”

Even Rousseau, often cited by social democrats, recognized that rights are meaningless if they can be arbitrarily assigned or revoked. The difference lies in whether one believes freedom is an individual default—or a collective permission.

The Moral Isn’t Always the Legal

People often conflate what’s moral with what should be enforced as a right. Abandoning a child may be morally reprehensible, but if no one is punished for it, we must admit it isn’t treated as a legal or enforceable right. If unborn or abandoned children routinely go uncared for without consequence, then society doesn’t actually recognize their “right” to life or care. Harsh, but true.

Likewise, you may feel morally compelled to help someone drowning, but you are not legally obligated to do so. And you’re certainly not obligated to risk your own life. Rights do not require you to sacrifice yourself for others. Morality may urge you to act. Rights cannot compel it.

Common Arguments Worth Addressing

Here are some of the most frequent rebuttals I hear to this position—and why I reject them.

1. “Freedom means nothing without basic needs.”
Freedom isn’t comfort. It’s non-interference. You can be poor and free, or rich and enslaved. Don’t confuse provision with liberty.

2. “Rights evolve with society.”
Civil rights were about extending equal negative rights to all people. Calling positive entitlements “rights” is not progress—it’s mission creep.

3. “We live in a society. That means shared responsibility.”
True. But shared responsibility should be voluntary, not coerced. You can’t impose a contract on someone just because they were born inside your borders.

4. “The majority says it’s a right.”
Rights that can be voted away aren’t rights. They’re permissions granted by the mob.

5. “Everyone deserves dignity.”
Dignity comes from agency and self-sufficiency—not from dependence on others.

6. “You benefited from others. You owe society.”
Gratitude doesn’t equal obligation. Using public services doesn’t mean you’re forever in debt to whoever built them, especially when you had no choice.

7. “No one survives alone. We all need each other.”
Cooperation is part of life, but cooperation under threat of force is not community—it’s coercion.

Conclusion

I believe in the right to speak, to think, to defend yourself, to own what you’ve earned, and to be left alone. I believe those rights belong to you by virtue of being human, and no one has to give them to you.

I also believe in helping others—willingly. But if your survival depends on what someone else must provide, you don’t have a right. You have a need. And those are not the same thing.

This is just one man’s opinion about rights. But I believe it’s worth saying out loud in a time when so many confuse compassion with compulsion.

MicG