Re:Seniors and the generation spending gap
by dredmorbius on Wednesday September 10, 2014 @05:08AM
(#8295641)
"Rights" (in this context) are things to which one has a legal claim. Property ownership is a right. Rights may be limited or unlimited, alienable or inalienable (which is to say, transferrable), or absolute or non-absolute (which is frequently confused with alienability).
An absolute right granted by law (e.g., Constitutional Rights which may not be infringed, or if you subscribe to them, universal human rights) would generally superscede others. There's a fairly strong argument against such rights in general, and I happen to see the discussion of rights in general as being greatly muddied.
That's not to say that many of the claims granted by these rights are bad. I think there are very strong arguments in favor of free speech (though not unlimited), of freedom of religion, of due process. Also of education and healthcare, possibly of a minimum income. Other rights I'm less convinced of, particularly in a resource-constrained world.
But the right to remove someone from their home without consequence strikes me as a peculiar one. Even Russia's serfs were considered to be bound to the land. They couldn't be moved separately from it (nor did they have the right to move themselves, but this wasn't terribly different from restraints on internal migration, say, as in England under its Poor Laws in the 17th century).
An absolute right granted by law (e.g., Constitutional Rights which may not be infringed, or if you subscribe to them, universal human rights) would generally superscede others. There's a fairly strong argument against such rights in general, and I happen to see the discussion of rights in general as being greatly muddied.
That's not to say that many of the claims granted by these rights are bad. I think there are very strong arguments in favor of free speech (though not unlimited), of freedom of religion, of due process. Also of education and healthcare, possibly of a minimum income. Other rights I'm less convinced of, particularly in a resource-constrained world.
But the right to remove someone from their home without consequence strikes me as a peculiar one. Even Russia's serfs were considered to be bound to the land. They couldn't be moved separately from it (nor did they have the right to move themselves, but this wasn't terribly different from restraints on internal migration, say, as in England under its Poor Laws in the 17th century).