Your argument that one set of rights requires government coersion and the other doesn't is bogus.

I disagree.

Try exercising your freedom of speech right now. Go ahead and do it.

See? Exercising your freedom of speech just now didn't require any coercion or threat of coercion on your part.

Now try exercising your right to health care, which in modern day usage implies that you have a right to obtain health care services even if you cannot pay for the services. Just imagine how you would go about exercising this right. You would either have to coerce the health care provider into providing these services, or you would have to have a third party pay for these services under the threat of coercion.

I completely agree with you that rights are theoretical. Obviously, the distinction between negative freedoms and positive freedoms means nothing to a society that does not recognize freedom.

However, assuming that one believes in the abstract concept of freedom, there is a very obvious distinction between negative freedom and positive freedom, and that is that the former does not require coercion or the threat of coercion while the latter does.

You seem preoccupied with the act of government stepping in to protect an individual's rights. I maintain that in the case of negative rights, the government does not step in to give or grant you your rights. It merely protects an existing right. I exercise my negative rights every single day of my life without coercing or threatening coercion towards anyone. It is only in the rare circumstances in which someone is intolerant enough to initiate force against me. It is only at that time–only after someone has initiated force (or threatened the use of force against me) that the government may act.

This is very different from a positive freedom in which someone somewhere must be coerced into sacrificing their negative freedom in order to grant another person's positive freedom.

Thanks, Nicrivera!

I may be mistaken, but the last time I looked, Disqus has no easily and promptly accessible page or page portion that lists what can be done and how to do it, with comments. (It's a more general topic to what extent the designers of many such technical things are detached from the real world, or socially inept, and are highly impractical or just don't conceive of designing user interfaces with the user in mind!)

Many people have private education (or home-schooling, as leftist Thom Hartmann has done with at least one child, after moving earlier from public to private education, and still being dissatisfied), and of course most people have private-sector health care, have nothing in this area given to them as a positive “right” (claim or benefit or entitlement).

“I think what DLS wants people to think “

You would be mistaken again, but that's not the first time for my antagonists and critics.

* * *

“You need the implicit guarentee of government/group force to protect a right or it isn't really a right.”

That's not true. The right itself exists independently from any decision to use force to protect it.

That is the part I find naive. The govenment does, in fact, grant that right, because without its monopoly on the use of force, that right would not exist IN PRACTICE. Any right can exist in theory, but it isn't real unless it can be demonstrated in practice. People can say anything as long as what they say doesn't offend anyone's sensibilities, even in the nastiest dictatorships or most repressive societies. However, in many societies, you would get beaten down or killed if you exercised those free expression rights in an unpopular way or in a way that offended those in power. This is true even in primative societies that don't have a state. In fact, the people in those community may feel that they are protecting that community from YOU. That your free expression will contaminate them or cause moral harm or anger violent people who will take it out on the entire community. When you don't have the coercive power of the state behind a set of laws, might equals right and the mighty love life!

You need the implicit guarentee of government/group force to protect a right or it isn't really a right. The government HAS to coerce/force people to behave, according to a certain set of standards or laws in order for NEGATIVE rights to actually exist. Your argument that one set of rights requires government coersion and the other doesn't is bogus. Both require the government actively enforce law, to force people to behave in a way that they do not want to. You have to force the mighty to give up their advantages, to lose battles they could have won with force / by abusing their power.

How do I get the gray rectangle behind a block quote, like Leonidas often uses?

Type: [blockquote]…[/blockquote]
except instead of [ ] and [/ ], you have to use < > and </ >

Also, for all other commenters, if you go to internet menu bar across the top of your screen, select “View” and then select “Source”, an “Original Source” pop up will appear on your screen, and you can use it to learn the HTLM codes.

You can USE negative freedoms to cause harm. For instance, you can use your free speech to libel people. You can use your property rights to construct a lead smelter on your property to poison and permenently harm all the people within many miles. You can use your property rights to redirect sufficient water resources to destroy downstream farms and industry. It is the POSITIVE freedoms that protect us from this kind of abuse of power.

OK. I admit that you actually bring up a good point in the case of libel. Many libertarians of the anarchist variety would argue that the act of libeling someone is not a violent act and that therefore, no one has a right to initiate force (or have someone initiate force on their behalf) in order to prevent someone from libeling them. I believe that virtually all classical liberals and minarchist libertarians would agree however that the act of libel is harmful and that no one has any inherent right to libel someone. But I would have to agree with you that libel is a tricky subject with regards to negative freedoms.

I would maintain, however, that your smelter example and your redirecting water resources example are not inconsistent with what I said before about negative rights. They fall under the idea of property rights. A person has the right to build a smelter on his own property and to manage his own water resources as he sees fit. This right, however, cannot violate another person's property right. So I would argue that negative freedoms do not give any property owner the right to poison the water or air outside their property, nor do negative freedoms to alter the course of a waterway.

If the abuse of a NEGATIVE freedom ticks off enough people, then you need the state to stop them from harming you.

If someone becomes angered by your act of negative freedom and initiates force against you, then yes, you may use force against that person for defensive purposes, or you may authorize the government to use force against them on your behalf. Indeed, this is the entire purpose of having a government in a free society: to protect individuals' lives, liberties, and properties. But this is the same regardless of whether the freedom you are exercising is popular or not, so I still don't see what being “popular” has to do with the concept of negative freedoms. Negative freedoms are inherent rights that exist independent of government. The government does not grant you those rights; it merely recognizes them. You don't need the government in order to exercise your negative freedoms.

I could go around town telling people that I hate Democrats or that I hate Republicans or that I hate children or that I hate the elderly. This would not be very “popular”, but my right to do so would remain, and I would not need the government in order to exercise this right. If someone decides to initiate force against me, then yes, the government is authorized to act on my behalf. But the government is not giving me or granting me anything. It is merely protecting a right that I already possessed.

This is very different than the concept of positive freedoms, in which case, an individual is asking something of another person or asking the government to act on their behalf. If an individual believes they have a right to health care, he cannot simply demand a service from a health care provider. That individual either has to pay for it or work out some agreement with the health care provider. If that individual refuses to pay or is unable to work out some agreement with the health care provider, then that individual, in demanding their “right to healthare” can only obtain that service through the act or threat of force–whether that person is using force (i.e. theft or coersion) himself or asking the government to do so on his behalf.

Any government imposed redistribution of resources and services is based on the concept of positive freedoms. This means that people's negative freedoms (i.e. property rights) are infringed upon in order to grant people the positive freedoms that they or society as a whole demands. Since classical liberals are not anarchists, they believe in having a government with limited powers. Unless that government is so small that if fulfils no more than the role of a night watchmen, then that government is necessarily going to involve the abridgement of some negative freedoms. This is the essence of government, since the government, afterall, has a monopoly on the use of force, and every law that a government passes is backed up with the threat of the use of force.

Classical liberals and miniarchist libertarians seek to keep the government as small as possible in order preserve negative freedoms and minimize the amount of state-sanctioned force. This distinguishes them from modern day liberals (and modern day conservatives) who–on a number of different issues–believe that the government should be able to initiate force against its own citizens or people in foreign countries to achieve whatever end they believe is just.

How do I get the gray rectangle behind a block quote, like Leonidas often uses?

When the Liberals starting getting real power, and acting like this:

Justice Department concludes black voters need Democratic Party

This is the politicalization of the law. A law made to ensure that blacks not be allowed the right to vote is now being used to ensure that the Democratic national party gets their candidate to win. It also is an insult to the voters of that overwhelmingly democratic stronghold, essentially saying that they aren't smart enough to decide who they should vote for unless there is a “D” beside the candidate's name.

All you have to do is change “liberals are pinko communist welfare moms of color or drunken decadent Hollyweirdos” to “liberals are long haired, hippy-type, pinko fags, that I betchya even got a commie flag tacked up on the wall inside of their garage” and you have the makings of a song!

You can USE negative freedoms to cause harm. For instance, you can use your free speech to libel people. You can use your property rights to construct a lead smelter on your property to poison and permenently harm all the people within many miles. You can use your property rights to redirect sufficient water resources to destroy downstream farms and industry. It is the POSITIVE freedoms that protect us from this kind of abuse of power.

And as for a negative freedom being unpopular, what does unpopular have to do with it?

If the abuse of a NEGATIVE freedom ticks off enough people, then you need the state to stop them from harming you. So, frankly, to protect negative freedoms, you need state coersion, also. It is naive to think otherwise. You can't assume that people will be civilized. Certainly the state in China is protecting the negative rights of business people to conduct their business as they see fit. Of course, those poor people being poisoned lack the positive rights to clean air and water.

In fact, the negative freedom of speech is protected by the state more often than you realize. I would bet that there have been plenty of cases in your life where you said things that made people angry. Some (certainly not all) of those people would have physically attacked you if it weren't for the laws on assault.

I think?

It should go without saying that modern day conservatives are not classical liberals either. There is nothing classically liberal about the Patriot Act, the War on Drugs, the FCC, laws against certain sexual activities, trade embargoes, pre-emptive war, or having U.S. bases in more than 100 foreign countries around the world. These are all issues that modern day conservatives have championed in recent years.

The epilogue to the New Deal is how the Old Right coaltion of conservatives and libertarians fractured when libertarians learned that conservatives were for smaller government in name only. Of course, the conservative movement hardly needed the libertarians anyway. They more than made up for the loss of conservatives by picking up the socially conservative welfare/warfare state Democrats who continued their big government ways, only under a different party banner.

That isn't entirely true. When people are using their 'negative' freedoms in ways that are harmful or unpopular, you absolutely need government coersion (the police and the legal system) to protect that freedom.

I'm not following you.

What would be an example of a negative freedom that is harmful?

And as for a negative freedom being unpopular, what does unpopular have to do with it? Should freedom of speech be restricted when the nature of the speech is unpopular? Should the freedom to practice one's religion be restricted if that particular religion happens to be unpopular? Should the right to a fair trial be restricted because the accused is unpopular?

In a free society, liberty isn't determined by a majority vote.

The second does not require the first.

Note that some (farther left) would say that the goal could be achieved by redistribution.

Also, people stuck in the 50s and 60s are unrealistic. Even then there was overreach; and what was sought then obviously can't be expected now, not in the real world. Continuously lowering the age of retirement, to name one obvious example, is in fact antithetical — people are living longer and are healthier. (The age of retirement, predicated on traditional criteria that involve disability that accompanies aging, has for years belonged in the seventies, which is higher than the arbitrary and long-obsolete age 65 that is associated with government retirement programs. In fact, retirement age could be the legitimate object of indexing for longevity and health, and be ever increasing, as a result, which is realistic, unlike demands or expectations of ever-downward retirement age to somewhere around the early fifties if not earlier, which is simply out of the question.)

The idea here is that the Left is opposition but the Right is government and convention or orthodoxy.

Left and Right are inverted, in the case of the Soviet Union (where the Communist Establishment was seen as the Right or conservative while opponents in the USSR and in the Soviet Bloc such as the Solidarity movement were seen as the Left or as liberals). This is a theme explicated in “Liberalism Revisited” (written by a conservative who was so much so he was also a monarchist).

That man actually wrote specifically on “liberalism” and what it means now, which is most pertinent:

http://www.mmisi.org/ir/33_01/leddihn.pdf

. . .

We see something of an echo here in the West since the late 1960s in that it is the Left that has been reactionary and suppressive of dissension or opposition to conformity (the meaning of “political correctness,” which is naturally enforced, not merely a conjectural matter only).

There's a completely unrelated “blend” of traditional Left and Right in the practice in the USA primarily of fascism being sought as the preferred authoritarian construction over outright nationalization or Communism as the model for so much in the modern welfare state and related substantial presence of government (especially the federal government in the USA).