Rights and Entitlements are Not the Same Thing

To the detriment of the political discourse, we do not in the common parlance draw the proper distinction between rights and entitlements. The two are distinct and should not be confused.  The perennial public debate over the role of the government in the lives of individuals would be a lot clearer if the distinction between the two were properly drawn and were better understood. 

RIGHTS are inherent.   Genuine rights are not granted to persons by king or country and cannot be taken from the individual. This leaves the question of what constitutes a right and who says so.   Some see rights as divine. They are God given. Thomas Jefferson was quite upfront about this in the Declaration of Independence:  We are endowed by our creator with certain unalienable rights…   Others, on the other hand, bypassing the religious argument altogether, talk about Natural Rights.  Again, there is a problem of definition, or more precisely, who gets to do the defining. 

The Philosophy of Human Rights (1989) is an anthology of academic articles on the titular subject.  Therein, a distinction is made between three approaches to human rights.

There are First World rights which deal with behavior and liberty; call it freedom of the spirit.  These are characteristically promulgated in more developed countries where basic human needs are virtually assured.  In the broadest sense, these rights are aimed at assuring the freedom to largely live one’s life as one sees fit. 

The second construct deals with freedom from want. It sees certain goods and services as essential to the human condition. The underlying argument here is that such abstractions as free speech mean very little when one is starving.  Acceptance of this premise makes the provision of certain basics of life the purview of the state. Access to essential goods and services becomes an individual right which, when necessary, is subservient to the more ephemeral rights of the spirit.   The assumption is that all are entitled to sustenance before anyone is entitled to more.  These are characterized as Second World rights by the author.  They were paramount in twentieth century socialist experiments.  For all the rhetoric and even constitutional guarantees, these socialist countries never produced enough goods and services to adequately grant to the people the fruits of these presumptive rights.   

The third model is cultural and is assigned to the Third World.  In these societies, rights are extended or limited by tradition.  A member of culturally-defined community might have the right to build a hut on tribal land; or maybe the right to be stoned to death for adultery.  There are apparently no universal principles here. 

Philosophy aside, the bottom line is that rights are defined by each society as it sees fit and they are only real and meaningful to the degree that the society chooses to encode them and protect them.  The only definitive rights in the United States are those in the federal and state Constitutions and these are only meaningful to the degree that they are guaranteed by custom and law.  These rights are lofty and ephemeral; they address thought, expression and behavior.  How one’s rights are honored and guarded is consequential. Americans are not jailed for bad-mouthing the President; Turks these days are.

ENTITLEMENTS, on the other hand, are discretionary.  They are usually goods and services provided by the community at the community’s discretion.  Entitlements are neither God-given nor natural.  They are a societal choice.  They can be non-existent, minimal or generous.   They exist only when the community agrees in some formal sense, usually through a political process.  They are not fixed but rather can be enhanced, reduced or eliminated at any time.   For example, a US citizen may have an entitlement to food stamps today.  This is very different than a right to food for all time.  

Most government entitlements fall into one of four categories:  education, health care, food or housing.  These are primary needs of all human beings. That all citizens have adequate access to these goods and services is a benefit to the individual but also beneficial to the broader society.  Healthy, well-educated citizens who are adequately housed and fed can be deemed to constitute a public good.  However, this assertion does not automatically elevate government assistance to the individual to the status of a human right. 

In the thirty articles enumerating the rights of individuals in the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, only education is elevated to the level of a right.  This expansive document, aimed at providing guidance to governments worldwide, makes no mention of food, shelter or health care as a human right.  

Conflating rights and entitlements confuses the political dialogue.  Unlike rights, entitlements are voluntary and arbitrary.    A right must be equally applied to every citizen.  My freedom of speech is neither greater nor less than yours.  How do you apply this to entitlements?  Provision of goods and services by government as a right is problematic at best.  Is housing a right?  How much housing?  Where?  Who gets the penthouse and who gets the basement?  And who decides?  

Left-leaning political activists, from liberals through progressives and on to democratic socialists, routinely elevate entitlements to the level of rights.  Food stamps, housing vouchers, health care and public education are arguably good ideas.  Government standards and direct assistance in these areas are arguably appropriate.   Nevertheless, these are still not rights and the level at which these public benefits are provided is still an arbitrary political choice.

Pure collectivist economic structures make virtually all goods and services the purview of only the state.  Free-enterprise concepts, by contrast, leave almost all production to the unencumbered marketplace.  These extremes are both problematic.  All or nothing is not a viable answer.  The process of determining the collective level of responsibility for individual needs is political.  The public discourse around entitlements would be much easier if we acknowledged that it is merely a straightforward political process.  Properly understood, this is just another debate in the political arena.  Taking good and evil out of the equation allows for civil conversation without all the vitriol.