Hayek has spent 3 chapters of The Mirage Of Social Justice explaining that true justice resides in rules of just conduct which govern individual behavior and the way we interact with other individuals. The rules are negative – they tell us what we must not do. They leave us freedom to be creative and entrepreneurial so long as we abide by the rules of just conduct. None of us can guarantee the results we will achieve as a consequence of exercising our individual freedoms. We simply try our best.

Yet, out of nowhere, the children of the welfare state have developed the feeling that “society” owes them particular things, and that “society” must act to provide them with those things, whether it’s a free education or free healthcare or a job. Hayek insists that the claim that these rights are due to them has nothing to do with justice, and that there is no way such a claim can be satisfied in a free society.

Misunderstanding Of The Term “Rights”.

Firstly, there is a complete misunderstanding about the term “right”. Claims of rights make sense only when they can be directed to an individual or an organization that can act within the rules of just conduct to deliver them. In contract law, a contract declares one party to have rights and one party to have a duty to make good on those rights. This is not an abstract but a specific concept. No-one has the right to a particular state of affairs unless someone else has the duty to secure it. We have no right that our houses don’t burn down, or that our products and services can find a buyer, or that any particular goods and services be provided to us. It is meaningless to speak of a right in the sense of a claim on society.

What about the so-called Bill Of Rights? These articles do not constitute a claim on government. They are a demand that, so far as the power of government extends, it ought to be used justly, i.e. applied the same to everyone. The Articles in the Bill Of Rights could easily be replaced by a single formula requiring government to use no coercion, and to follow rules that apply to everyone equally. The organization for coercion that we call government can not and should not be used to determine the particular material possessions of individuals or groups.

Social And Economic Rights Will Destroy The Old Civil Rights.

Social justice warriors have built on the negative civil right to be free from government coercion a new set of positive “social and economic” human rights, for which an equal or higher dignity is claimed. These are claims to particular benefits to which every human being is presumed to be entitled without any understanding of who is under the obligation to provide them, or how they might be provided. It’s meaningless to describe them as claims on “society” because “society can not act or value or treat anyone in a particular way. The only way this could be accomplished is to replace a free society with a totalitarian organization that can tell everyone in it what to do. The old civil rights and the new social and economic rights are in direct and complete incompatibility with each other. The new social rights can only be achieved by destroying the old civil rights.

A Lot Of It Started With FDR.

One major impetus for all this crazy thinking was the proclamation by the uber-socialist Franklin Delano Roosevelt of the “four freedoms”, which included “freedom from want”, and “freedom from fear”, together with the old “freedom of worship” and “freedom of speech”. No individual, no government, no organization can be given the duty of delivering freedom from want or freedom from fear. One is economically open ended and the other is emotionally open ended. Like social justice, these terms can not be defined, and can not be turned into action, and so they are empty and meaningless rhetoric. Roosevelt set an awful precedent, and worse was to come.

And Then The United Nations Took Crazy Thinking To A New Level.

The Universal Declaration Of Human Rights adopted by the General Assembly of The United Nations in 1948 adds seven further guarantees intended to express the new “social and economic” rights.

• Everyone, “as a member of society”, is assured the satisfaction of positive claims to particular benefits, without anyone having the duty or burden of providing them, and without an attempt to define the legal meaning of the words in the Declaration.
• What, for example, can be the legal meaning that “everyone is entitled to the realization….of the economic, social and cultural rights indispensable to his dignity and free development of his personality” (Article 22)?
• Against whom is “everyone” to have a claim to “just and favorable conditions of work” (Article 23-1)? And to “just and favorable employment” (Article 23-3)?
• What are the consequences of the requirement that everyone have the right “freely to participate in the cultural life of the community and to share in the scientific advances and its benefits” (Article 27)?
• “Everyone” is even said to be “entitled to a social and international order in which the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration are fully realized” (Article 28) – implying that not only is this possible but that there exists now a known method by which these claims can be satisfied for all.

It is clear that all these “rights” assume a “society” that is an organization, run by the UN, in which “everyone” is “employed”. Sounds like a world government. Hayek calls it “totalitarian in the fullest sense of the word”. The UN and their sympathizers have become “total strangers to the basic ideals of a free society”. Hayek terms this “tragic”.

If we wish everyone to be well off, we shall get closest to our goal, not by commanding by law that this should be achieved, or by giving everybody a legal claim to what we think they ought to have, but by providing inducements for all to do as much as they can that will benefit others. What the UN declares as rights are simply aspirations that only a voluntary system can fulfill.