| I can try to provide a perspective. From what moral authority do positive rights originate? (a right that requires someone to provide you with a good or service) From what moral authority do negative rights originate? (a right that prevents somebody from interfering with you or harming you) Over the course of hundreds or perhaps thousands of years, negative rights have been developed successfully in legal systems around the world. We've seen demonstrable evidence that enforcing protections of negative rights results in a happier and more productive population. Different countries have also, generally more recently, brought forth positive rights by various means- welfare programs, socialism, full communism, or otherwise. People that tend to care more about negative rights than positive rights tend toward right-libertarianism. Positive rights, in a sense, require those who can provide to forfeit some of their freedom, in order to help those who require it. There is a non-zero risk that a well-meaning welfare or socialist policy fails in its mission despite good intentions. Many of the communist states with the most heartfelt populist movements have seen the deepest failures. So in the right-libertarian mindset, there is a risk of a two-fold (or perhaps threefold) failure: -It promised to provide (positive rights) prosperity to all, and it didn't -It had to trample on the negative rights of the wealthy to try to redistribute their wealth -(more vague)It eroded many individuals' notion of self-determination in the process, and in doing so left them less likely to work towards their own values. Separately, there's the important notion of what the "staying alive threshold" is. Almost nobody in G7 countries dies of hunger or thirst, and those who do were likely in a crisis not determined by lack of access. Statistically, life expectancy increases with income up to and past $100,000/yr. The spectrum in between is fraught. |