Liberals and positive rights

At some point, liberals began to prefer positive rights to negative rights. Most of the philosophical problems that cause liberalism to introduce the very totalitarianism it loathes come from the shift to positive rights because positive rights require action on the part of others in order to exist.

Rights like unemployment benefits, public education, universal health care coverage and access to an attorney in all serious criminal cases are positive rights because, at the very least, they require taxes in order to sustain. In most cases, they also require things like limits on individual autonomy and choice. Socialized health care and public education often require a de facto, if not de jure, legal monopoly on the service in order to be effective (from the liberal's perspective). Liberals must, then, naturally be hostile to choice because increased competition could cause the naturally less efficient government service to forced out of business. Most public schools would quickly collapse for lack of quality in a free market, and that's just but one example.

Positive rights are not inherently bad. There are some positive rights which are beneficial to the public and civilization. Children have a positive right to support from their parents. We have created a positive right to basic legal counsel for the poor, and that has at least helped some defendants. However, positive rights always carry a direct, measurable social cost in the reduction of someone's liberty and autonomy, even if it's "only" less money on their paycheck.

The unwillingness of most liberals to consider the cost of their implementation of positive rights is what ultimately causes their programs to foster many of the things which they don't want. By abandoning public education, liberals could have true, pure secular education while religious conservatives could have religious education and the two would never need to come into conflict, but the liberal dogma surrounding public education is too entrenched for it to be easily reevaluated.

In general, liberals have either created positive rights or abandoned negative rights for positive rights on at least the following issues:

• Personal safety; gun rights have been replaced with police protection.
• Health care and housing.
• Education.
• Anti-discrimination.
• Workplace hostility.
• Retirement and unemployment.
• Marriage.

For a variety of reasons, and in a variety of ways, the government is now involved in these matters. The government raises more taxes, and that reduces the economic autonomy of individuals. The government increases the regulation to define and enforce the positive rights, and that results in decreased personal and economic autonomy for individuals. The government then needs more law enforcement to police the system it has created, which increases the scope of law enforcement's authority over the general public. Often, as the role of law enforcement increases as a result of the new positive rights-related regulations, it gains new police powers and prerogatives to help it enforce additional aspects of the positive rights. For example, the state has an incredible amount of power to seize and distribute property in order to help it enforce its marriage and divorce laws, not to mention distribute access to children and pets, and even limit rights like the second amendment rights of parties to a divorce.

A liberal who actually reflects on the consequences of their ideas and accepts the dischord between the results and their intent must either become an unabashed statist, ie a totalitarian, or a libertarian.