Ted Lieu's 'Defense' Of Free Speech

As of this writing in December, 2018, Ted Lieu is the U.S. Representative for California's 33rd Congressional district.

The image below shows my response to Lieu's tweet that he would "like to regulate Fox News", but that he cannot because of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, and that is, to quote Lieu again, "a good thing in the long run."

This is a confession of a sociopathic impulse, and a very weak defense of the First Amendment's protection of free speech.  The implication of Lieu's comment is that he has the sensibilities to properly censor popular news organizations, but that others should not have that power, and so it is "a good thing in the long run" that even Lieu himself not be granted that
power —

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https://twitter.com/MaxAutonomous/status/1073124266495827968

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I received a response to my tweet via e-mail stating that Ted Lieu's tweet "is fine", because in the end Lieu did state that it is good that he cannot act on his impulse to censor others because of the First Amendment —

"... but this tweet is fine. He is saying it is a good thing we have the first amendment.  Yes, his admitted urge to censor is strange, but he seems to recognize it is good that the government doing so is illegal."

The writer then used as a kind of analogous example an opponent of rent control living in a rent controlled apartment, when they would prefer that government initiations of force like rent control be illegal —

" ... That [rent control] should be illegal ...  If it were illegal, I could honestly say 'I'd rent that apartment from you at a forcibly under market rate, but that is illegal.  I am glad it is, because it's better in the long run.'  Right?"

This seems reasonable, since as an individual citizen you cannot control what government does, and being a renter by itself is not a participation in the implementation of rent control.  Provided an individual does nothing to help institute or perpetuate government coercion, they share no guilt in it.

But there is an important difference between this example and the impulse to censor speech — that someone rents in a city with an immoral rent control law, is not the same as having an impulse to implement rent control, as Lieu stated he had an impulse to implement censorship to "regulate" Fox News.

That is, there is a difference between saying that I would live in a rent controlled city, if it were the most convenient location, while still opposing rent control, and saying I would like to live in a city whose rents I could control, but I cannot because it is illegal, and I know that is ultimately a good thing in the long run.

The difference is having an impulse to do something that can only do harm, and being grateful not because you cannot act on your impulse, but because some others cannot act on theirs, versus not having the impulse at all, because you know it can only do harm.

This is exactly why I responded to Lieu the way I did — way too many people think their sociopathic tendencies have a reasonable quality and would be beneficial if only they alone could act on them, but are perhaps just not "a good thing in the long run" if all others had the chance to get the same power, and so they have some kind of enlightenment for forgoing their desire to subjugate others.

No one will ever convince me that the impulse to initiate force against others "is fine".

And, regarding their appeal, there is another critical difference between rent control and government censorship that should be highlighted — despite both being destructive policies that should be illegal.

Many people have studied rent control, and so they know the economics and the harm that it causes — hence the writer's comment that it should be illegal.  This old joke from economics comes to mind:  "Short of aerial bombardment, rent control is the surest way to destroy a city."  No disagreement there.
     https://www.adamsmith.org/blog/planning-transport/only-bombing-would-be-worse-than-rent-control
     https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2016/06/12/silicon-valley-decides-to-bomb-its-own-housing-market-...
     http://archive.is/0z5zr
     https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2009/10/rethinking-rent-control/29072/
     https://web.archive.org/.../https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2009/10/rethinking-rent-control/29072/

But what makes rent control appeal to so many people?  Not much.  It requires the initiation of force, and that alone is the justification for opposing it.   There are also no good economic arguments to defend price controls in general, so anyone who studies price controls at all (including rent control) will learn they exacerbate problems, rather than solve them.   Obviously, scarcity and poverty cannot be reduced by fixing prices.  See Henry Hazlitt's 'Economics In One Lesson' for a discussion of the destructive consequences of price fixing —
     https://fee.org/resources/economics-in-one-lesson/#calibre_link-27

So what is at the root of the popular appeal of a destructive subsidy like rent control?  Dishonesty.

People simply want something they cannot afford, and so they band together with other people who are willing to be dishonest, to attempt to use government to make other people subsidize them — while they ignore the force employed on their behalf by government, as well as the destructive consequences that follow as a result of pushing the cost of what they are using onto others.

This dishonesty is what gives rise to bizarre, nonsensical rationalizations, such as: "it's part of the social contract", or "you have to give back to society", or "<service X> is a human right", and of course, "you didn't build that".   None of these simpleminded comments can withstand any scrutiny, and they are all employed in an attempt to avoid identifying the forced subsidy that lower income taxpayers receive under progressive taxation, as if others must subsidize them by right.

But at least forcing someone else to pay has that thin veneer of appeal: "cheap stuff for me is good".

But what gives Ted Lieu's impulse to censor a veneer of plausibility or respectability?

Notice that in Lieu's tweet he mentioned Fox News, and not Antifa, or some neo-Nazi group, or any other similar group actively promoting violence.  This aspect of Lieu's comment is especially perversely fascinating — given the recent repeated acts of so-called 'political' violence, which are legitimately illegal, it is interesting that Ted Lieu expressed an impulse to silence a news organization he does not like.  Pity Lieu's impulses are not more focused on controlling criminals who are committing actual acts of violence.

Can anyone describe even a supposed simpleminded benefit that would come from Ted Lieu's hypothetical ability to censor a popular news organization?  Why not censor MSNBC, for example?  Are they not just as biased as Fox News?

It would be difficult to make the case that other news organizations are not at least as biased as Fox News, but singling out one news organization as Lieu did, as if only that organization stands out as being biased above all others, is only a confession of bias.  That Lieu would mention a single news organization, as if it alone deserved to be "regulated", is just another indication of his corruption.

But how could just bias, even if true (rather than calls for violence), give rise to an impulse to censor?  Does Ted Lieu not see his own bias?

A craven hypocrite demanding rent control has a slight moral superiority when compared to Lieu — at least the rent control advocate demands theft for their own direct benefit, while Lieu has an openly admitted impulse to control what others can experience, as if his sensibilities about what anyone should even be permitted to think about are somehow superior.  Power for the sake of power.

Whatever one comes to believe about Ted Lieu's motivations and his impulse to censor, he certainly cannot be described as attempting to get at the truth.

In that regard, consider this quote from John Stuart Mill's 'On Liberty', 'Chapter II: Of the Liberty of Thought and Discussion', regarding the critical role of considering adversaries in honestly forming one's opinions (emphasis added) —

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https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.222998/page/n31/mode/2up

http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/34901/pg34901.txt

... If the cultivation of the understanding consists in one thing more than in another, it is surely in learning the grounds of one’s own opinions.  Whatever people believe, on subjects on which it is of the first importance to believe rightly, they ought to be able to defend against at least the common objections.

... But when we turn to subjects infinitely more complicated, to morals, religion, politics, social relations, and the business of life, three-fourths of the arguments for every disputed opinion consist in dispelling the appearances which favor some opinion different from it.  The greatest orator, save one, of antiquity, has left it on record that he always studied his adversary’s case with as great, if not with still greater, intensity than even his own.  What Cicero practised as the means of forensic success, requires to be imitated by all who study any subject in order to arrive at the truth.  He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that.  His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them.  But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side; if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion.  The rational position for him would be suspension of judgment, and unless he contents himself with that, he is either led by authority, or adopts, like the generality of the world, the side to which he feels most inclination.  Nor is it enough that he should hear the arguments of adversaries from his own teachers, presented as they state them, and accompanied by what they offer as refutations.  This is not the way to do justice to the arguments, or bring them into real contact with his own mind.  He must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them; who defend them in earnest, and do their very utmost for them.  He must know them in their most plausible and persuasive form; he must feel the whole force of the difficulty which the true view of the subject has to encounter and dispose of, else he will never really possess himself of the portion of truth which meets and removes that difficulty.  Ninety-nine in a hundred of what are called educated men are in this condition, even of those who can argue fluently for their opinions.  Their conclusion may be true, but it might be false for anything they know: they have never thrown themselves into the mental position of those who think differently from them, and considered what such persons may have to say; and consequently they do not, in any proper sense of the word, know the doctrine which they themselves profess.  They do not know those parts of it which explain and justify the remainder; the considerations which show that a fact which seemingly conflicts with another is reconcilable with it, or that, of two apparently strong reasons, one and not the other ought to be preferred.  All that part of the truth which turns the scale, and decides the judgment of a completely informed mind, they are strangers to; nor is it ever really known, but to those who have attended equally and impartially to both sides, and endeavored to see the reasons of both in the strongest light.  So essential is this discipline to a real understanding of moral and human subjects, that if opponents of all important truths do not exist, it is indispensable to imagine them and supply them with the strongest arguments which the most skilful devil’s advocate can conjure up.

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I cannot think of a reasonable way to defend what Lieu wrote, especially given his qualification that others should not have the power to censor.  Ted Lieu's statement that the First Amendment preventing him from regulating Fox News is "a good thing in the long run" is a half-truth, at best.  The First Amendment's restriction is not just good in the long run, even if it happens to restrict some good people along the way — it is a requirement of civilization at all times.  Ted Lieu's statement regarding the First Amendment is corruption, because it implies something that is false — that Ted Lieu, or some other minority of supposed 'good people', could wield the power to censor honestly.

The point of the First Amendment is not:

"I have reasonable sensibilities, and so I would be able to censor intelligently, but many others who try to get power will not, and so censorship should be illegal."

The point of the First Amendment is this:

"No human being could wield the power to censor honestly, and so no human being should ever have that power."

Ted Lieu's sociopathic impulse is exactly what one should expect from a typical politician — that he is not more brazen about it does not justify giving him praise.

We live in a sick culture, and Lieu's polite, mealy-mouthed 'defense' of the First Amendment is just one indicator of that sad fact.

If Ted Lieu were to write founding state papers such as a U.S. Constitution, would he include anything resembling the First Amendment?   What has Ted Lieu ever done to indicate that?

I have no doubt that the majority of people would accuse me of exaggerating a poor 'turn of phrase' in this criticism of Ted Lieu, if not defend Lieu's statement outright.  But no one with a real understanding of the critical nature of the First Amendment, never mind adversarial challenges to one's opinions in general, would speak or write in the manner of Ted Lieu regarding the First Amendment.

If Ted Lieu's 'defense' of the First Amendment is considered 'reasonable' by the overwhelming majority, that is just one more demonstration of why much of the U.S. Constitution is ineffective at limiting government.

H.L. Mencken - "BAYARD vs LIONHEART", July 26, 1920

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"But when a candidate for public office faces the voters he does not face men of sense; he faces a mob of men whose chief distinguishing mark is the fact that they are quite incapable of weighing ideas, or even of comprehending any save the most elemental—men whose whole thinking is done in terms of emotion, and whose dominant emotion is dread of what they cannot understand.  So confronted, the candidate must either bark with the pack, or count himself lost.  His one aim is to disarm suspicion, to arouse confidence in his orthodoxy, to avoid challenge.  If he is a man of convictions, of enthusiasm, of self-respect, it is cruelly hard.   . . .

   . . . all the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre—the man who can most adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum."

    — H.L. Mencken, from 'BAYARD vs LIONHEART', July 26, 1920,
        taken from 'On Politics: A Carnival of Buncombe', 1956, p.21

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This piece from H.L. Mencken is a good reminder of the corruption entailed by democratic rule.  Without strict restrictions on voters, like the U.S. Constitution and its Bill of Rights, a 'democratic' mob will not retain any semblance of freedom, and even with such restrictions, a loss of freedom is still inevitable — it just takes longer to occur.  Notice that an overwhelming majority of voters have always longed to escape responsibility, and subjugate themselves to government — that the bulk of the U.S. Government's budget is transfer payments is eloquent testimony to that fact —

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BAYARD vs LIONHEART

H.L. Mencken   July 26, 1920

One discerns in all the current discussion of MM. Harding and Cox a certain sour dismay.  It seems to be quite impossible for any wholly literate man to pump up any genuine enthusiasm for either of them.  Each, of course, is praised lavishly by the professional politicians of his own party, and compared to Lincoln, Jefferson and Cleveland by the surviving hacks of the party press, but in the middle ground, among men who care less for party success than for the national dignity, there is a gone feeling in the stomach, with shooting pains down the legs.  The Liberals, in particular, seem to be suffering badly.  They discover that Harding is simply a third-rate political wheel-horse, with the face of a moving-picture actor, the intelligence of a respectable agricultural implement dealer, and the imagination of a lodge joiner, and that Cox is no more than a provincial David Harum with a gift for bamboozling the boobs.

These verdicts, it seems to me, are substantially just.  No one but an idiot would argue seriously that either candidate is a first-rate man, or even a creditable specimen of second-rate man.  Any State in the Union, at least above the Potomac, could produce a thousand men quite as good, and many States could produce a thousand a great deal better.  Harding, intellectually, seems to be merely a benign blank—a decent, harmless, laborious, hollow-headed mediocrity perhaps comparable to the late Harrington, of Maryland.  Cox is quicker of wit, but a good deal less honest.  He belongs to the cunning type; there is a touch of the shyster in him.  His chicaneries in the matter of prohibition, both during the convention and since, show the kink in his mind.  He is willing to do anything to cadge votes, and he includes in that anything the ready sacrifices of his good faith, of the national welfare, and of the hopes and confidence of those who honestly support him.  Neither candidate reveals the slightest dignity of conviction.  Neither cares a hoot for any discernible principle.  Neither, in any intelligible sense, is a man of honor.

But it is one thing to yield to virtuous indignation against such individuals and quite another thing to devise any practicable scheme for booting them out of the synagogue.  The weakness of those of us who take a gaudy satisfaction in our ideas, and battle for them violently, and face punishment for them willingly and even proudly, is that we forget the primary business of the man in politics, which is the snatching and safeguarding of his job.  That business, it must be plain, concerns itself only occasionally with the defense and propagation of ideas, and even then it must confine itself to those that, to a reflective man, must usually appear to be insane.  The first and last aim of the politician is to get votes, and the safest of all ways to get votes is to appear to the plain man to be a plain man like himself, which is to say, to appear to him to be happily free from any heretical treason to the body of accepted platitudes-to be filled to the brim with the flabby, banal, childish notions that challenge no prejudice and lay no burden of examination upon the mind.

It is not often, in these later days of the democratic enlightenment, that positive merit lands a man in elective office in the United States; much more often it is a negative merit that gets him there.  That negative merit is simply disvulnerability.  Of the two candidates, that one wins who least arouses the suspicions and distrusts of the great masses of simple men.  Well, what are more likely to arouse those suspicions and distrusts than ideas, convictions, principles? The plain people are not hostile to shysterism, save it be gross and unsuccessful.  They admire a Roosevelt for his bold stratagems and duplicities, his sacrifice of faith and principle to the main chance, his magnificent disdain of fairness and honor.  But they shy instantly and inevitably from the man who comes before them with notions that they cannot immediately translate into terms of their everyday delusions; they fear the novel idea, and particularly the revolutionary idea, as they fear the devil.  When Roosevelt, losing hold upon his cunning at last, embraced the vast hodgepodge of innovations, some idiotic but some sound enough, that went by the name of Progressivism, they jumped from under him in trembling, and he came down with a thump that left him on his back until death delivered him from all hope and caring.

It seems to me that this fear of ideas is a peculiarly democratic phenomenon, and that it is nowhere so horribly apparent as in the United States, perhaps the nearest approach to an actual democracy yet seen in the world.  It was Americans who invented the curious doctrine that there is a body of doctrine in every department of thought that every good citizen is in duty bound to accept and cherish; it was Americans who invented the right-thinker.  The fundamental concept, of course, was not original.  The theologians embraced it centuries ago, and continue to embrace it to this day.  It appeared on the political side in the Middle Ages, and survived in Russia into our time.  But it is only in the United States that it has been extended to all departments of thought.  It is only here that any novel idea, in any field of human relations, carries with it a burden of obnoxiousness, and is instantly challenged as mysteriously immoral by the great masses of right-thinking men.  It is only here, so far as I have been able to make out, that there is a right way and a wrong way to think about the beverages one drinks with one's meals, and the way children ought to be taught in the schools, and the manner in which foreign alliances should be negotiated, and what ought to be done about the Bolsheviki.

In the face of this singular passion for conformity, this dread of novelty and originality, it is obvious that the man of vigorous mind and stout convictions is gradually shouldered out of public life.  He may slide into office once or twice, but soon or late he is bound to be held up, examined and incontinently kicked out.  This leaves the field to the intellectual jelly-fish and inner tubes.  There is room for two sorts of them—first, the blank cartridge who has no convictions at all and is willing to accept anything to make votes, and, secondly, the mountebank who is willing to conceal and disguise what he actually believes, according as the wind blows hot or cold.  Of the first sort, Harding is an excellent specimen; of the second sort, Cox.

Such tests arise inevitably out of democracy—the domination of unreflective and timorous men, moved in vast herds by mob emotions.  In private life no man of sense would think of applying them.  We do not estimate the integrity and ability of an acquaintance by his flabby willingness to accept our ideas; we estimate him by the honesty and effectiveness with which he maintains his own.  All of us, if we are of reflective habit, like and admire men whose fundamental beliefs differ radically from our own.  But when a candidate for public office faces the voters he does not face men of sense; he faces a mob of men whose chief distinguishing mark is the fact that they are quite incapable of weighing ideas, or even of comprehending any save the most elemental—men whose whole thinking is done in terms of emotion, and whose dominant emotion is dread of what they cannot understand.  So confronted, the candidate must either bark with the pack, or count himself lost.  His one aim is to disarm suspicion, to arouse confidence in his orthodoxy, to avoid challenge.  If he is a man of convictions, of enthusiasm, of self-respect, it is cruelly hard.  But if he is, like Harding, a numskull like the idiots he faces, or, like Cox, a pliant intellectual Jenkins, it is easy.

The larger the mob, the harder the test.  In small areas, before small electorates, a first-rate man occasionally fights his way through, carrying even the mob with him by the force of his personality.  But when the field is nationwide, and the fight must be waged chiefly at second and third hand, and the force of personality cannot so readily make itself felt, then all the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre—the man who can most adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum.

The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men.  As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people.  We move toward a lofty ideal.  On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.

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'Positive Rights' Cannot Peacefully Coexist With Human Rights

Anyone who has paid taxes knows that tax collections are made with the threat of force.  The government is not asking for volunteers.

Many people seem to believe that if they avoid naming this fact, it will cease to exist.

For example, see the responses to my tweet below —

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https://twitter.com/MaxAutonomous/status/1063905909737279488

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Those who wish to pretend that tax payments do not entail an initiation of force, should tell others how they can 'opt out' of paying for all the destructive things that government does, since many people would like to know how to exercise that supposed 'freedom' (I know I would).  Obviously, this is not possible, which is what makes all tax collections an initiation of force — that is, if you refuse to pay (when that is even possible, as with income taxes), loss of freedom or property (i.e. prison time, or an asset seizure) is the ultimate consequence.

Notice the phrase the first responder used in the tweet above — "Or how you get to create the definition" — indicating that we can simply chose to ignore the actual relationship of a subjugated taxpayer to government, and so by 'creating a new definition', the nature of compulsory tax payments, which are made against the will of taxpayers, will no longer exist in reality.  Of course, the notion of 'creating a definition' has nothing to do with the enforcement mechanism actually used to collect tax payments.  The enforcement mechanism that government creates for tax collections is either acknowledged, or it is not — citizens have no ability to affect the process, or alter what it means, by 'creating new definitions'.  That is, government 'creates the definition', since government defines the tax code, and the penalties that will be exacted from those taxpayers who unilaterally decide that the payment system is voluntary (i.e. not an initiation of force).

And notice how the second responder to my tweet above, chose a check on the government's power to deprive citizens of freedom, that the founders wrote in the Bill of Rights (the right to counsel to defend against a state prosecution, in the 6th Amendment), as somehow indicating government is justified in always depriving people of freedom whenever a large enough group demands that others subsidize them.  This is the implication of trying to make it seem like forcing one group of taxpayers to purchase some good or service for another group (e.g. health care), is somehow consistent with an accused being legally required to have counsel during a state prosecution, at taxpayer expense.

The second responder implies that taxpayers (the state) providing an attorney at no cost to individuals being prosecuted by the state, as part of due process, is similar to forcing one group to pay for the medical care of another.  A court appointed attorney is a kind of small check on state power, because that 'subsidy' provides some assistance to those who are actually being attacked by the state (since that is what a criminal prosecution is).  A court appointed attorney is similar in concept to the Miranda warning, or any other element of due process, which must all be paid for by taxpayers — all such impediments on government's ability to imprison citizens make it harder for the state to railroad an accused (of course, these impediments also make it more difficult to imprison the guilty, since the process must be followed in all cases).  But notice the court system itself is a 'subsidy', when viewed in this way, since if the Founders were not so suspicious of government power, they could have 'simplified' the legal process by eliminating due process and the court system entirely, in order to reduce taxpayer expense (thankfully, they did not).

But what does that have to do with forcing one group to buy another group health care — as if health care can only be some kind of state process, or that health care needs were actually created by the state, and so must be funded by taxpayers?

Must it really be explained that if you cannot afford to purchase something yourself, and if you then use a political process to create legal penalties against others if they do not make tax payments to cover your cost (i.e. welfare redistribution in general), that you have participated in initiating force against others?  Again, to compare this to the 6th Amendment, notice that the Constitution does not create 'a right to counsel as needed', it grants 'a right to a defense against the state' — that is, it only applies in one set of circumstances, which the state controls, when it is explicitly trying to take away an individual's freedom.

Also notice that everything in the U.S. Constitution is intended to restrain government — even the election cycles are the forced replacement of political power at regular intervals (i.e. politicians must re-compete for their jobs whether they (or even the voters) like it or not).  It is disturbing to see how few seem to understand that the Constitution, from beginning to end, expresses a deep and well justified distrust of government and politicians.

A human right can only be defined as a right to freedom of action, to gain and keep property in order to sustain one's life — that is all.  You have a right to be left alone, to take action to acquire property to sustain your life, free from coercion (the only restriction being the rights of others to freedom of action), and so no legitimate human right can require action from others, except in cases of justified restitution (i.e. retaliatory force).  If you have not harmed someone, you have not violated their right to freedom of action, and so you do not morally owe them anything (certainly not hours or days of your labor).

This is a kind of axiomatic concept — trying to argue against it (that is, that people can morally be forced to satisfy the supposed 'positive rights' of others, without respect to any restitution) leads to hopeless contradictions.  That is, you have to argue that somehow one person has a 'higher standing' than another, based on some subjective criteria — poverty, lack of 'privilege', etc. — and so becomes 'entitled', and that those individuals you have assigned a 'lower standing' cannot morally disagree (they are not 'entitled'), and so they cannot morally fight back to protect themselves against the required initiation of force to satisfy the supposed 'positive right' that was created (e.g. free health care).

Of course, this is the lie that statists repeat over and over — if you disagree with their supposed moral hierarchy (e.g. the poor are 'entitled' to be subsidized by those more wealthy, a la Bernie Sanders, etc.), statists then define you as immoral, in an attempt to make any rebuttals to their self-contradictory position seem depraved.

In short, legitimate, moral human rights cannot exist to the extent that people accept the notion of 'positive rights', since an individual's right to freedom of action cannot peacefully coexist with the supposed 'positive right' of others to take his time and labor against his will.  Supposed 'positive rights' require an immoral initiation of force, because they can only be satisfied by the time and labor of others, and therefore, the loss of freedom (i.e. a rights violation) is required by the fulfillment of such supposed 'rights'.

To the extent that so-called 'positive rights' are enforced, actual human rights must be violated, since so-called 'positive rights' can only be fulfilled by taking by force.

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https://ari.aynrand.org/issues/government-and-business/individual-rights/Mans-Rights
http://aynrandlexicon.com/ayn-rand-works/the-virtue-of-selfishness.html
http://www.aynrand.org/novels/virtue-of-selfishness

    If some men are entitled by right to the products of the work of others, it means that those others are deprived of rights and condemned to slave labor.
    Any alleged “right” of one man, which necessitates the violation of the rights of another, is not and cannot be a right.
    No man can have a right to impose an unchosen obligation, an unrewarded duty or an involuntary servitude on another man.   There can be no such thing as “the right to enslave.”
    A right does not include the material implementation of that right by other men; it includes only the freedom to earn that implementation by one’s own effort.
    Observe, in this context, the intellectual precision of the Founding Fathers: they spoke of the right to the pursuit of happiness — not of the right to happiness. It means that a man has the right to take the actions he deems necessary to achieve his happiness; it does not mean that others must make him happy.
    The right to life means that a man has the right to support his life by his own work (on any economic level, as high as his ability will carry him); it does not mean that others must provide him with the necessities of life.
    The right to property means that a man has the right to take the economic actions necessary to earn property, to use it and to dispose of it; it does not mean that others must provide him with property.
— Ayn Rand, from her 1963 essay 'Man's Rights', included in her book 'The Virtue Of Selfishness'

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