Negative Rights

When people talk about human rights, the conversation often becomes a chaotic wish list. We hear about the "right" to healthcare, the "right" to a living wage, or the "right" to high-speed internet. While these might be desirable societal goals, framing them as rights creates a fundamental, unresolvable ethical contradiction. To build a consistent ethical framework for a free society, we must understand the critical difference between wanting something and having a right to it. This requires defining freedom not as an entitlement to the labor of others, but purely as the absence of coercion.