Food Is, Still, Clearly Not a Human Right - answers to you all

dlawbailey dlawbailey at netzero.net
Mon Apr 1 07:30:15 PST 2002


Food is not a human right because it cannot reasonably be so. This is not a question of libertarianism but common sense. You have to think of it from the point of view of what happens when something goes wrong. Let me give two quick paragraphs of questions to illustrate the inevitable quandaries.

Let's say that I, living in Washington State, in the U.S., am dissatisfied with my portion of the apple harvest. So, I go to court and claim that my right to food has been violated. First, against whom do I file the claim? Is it King County? The state government? The federal government? Is it the apple growers? Which apple growers?

Since Washington produces so many apples, the state would have to sell a great many. Say they sold too many in my view. Say there was a shortage because a particular grower decided to sell his land late in the harvest. Say the government claims the money it got from apple sales was insufficient to buy enough beef. Now whose fault is that? The government's? Which government? Is the entire beef industry to blame or only those ranchers bringing cattle to market when Washington state wanted to buy beef?

The above is why we basically have two underlying concepts of rights in the US and Britain: negative rights (that which people and governments must *not* do to an individual) and property rights - *not* so-called "positive rights". Positive rights turn inevitably into a quagmire. What you all are talking about with a "food right" only makes sense as a property right to food production - a civil entitlement to a government subsidy like Medicare. That's fine, but it isn't a right. It's a contract among parties. Within the contract each member has rights, but there is no general, a priori right informing the contract, other than the right of citizens to, through duly-elected legislatures, create large-scale, civil agreements amongst themselves.

Once you talk about food production in the real world, however, you take the question international and then you are in the world of treaties. If we want to say "There should a be a world food treaty," I say that's great. That statement, however, is miles away from saying there is a "right" to food. This "right" construction is naive, silly and without value.

Hakki,

You have property rights to your well water and the fish in public waters. In American you could sue and win.

Heartfield,

Clearly you see the problem but I think the transition to positive or social rights never loses sight of the idea of contracting among free people. As Justin says: "You have to be able to say what the right is _to_, you see, or the claim that there is a right is empty." Claims cannot remain vague and general demands on government but must ultimately be delineated and specified between consumers and producers, just as they are in a national health service, for example. A national health plan is not a "right" to healthcare, but a broadly-based contract among providers, consumers and a government administrator/mediator. The only difference is that the contract is not forged among the participants but in the legislature, a proper venue for such a generalized social contract.

Dennis Breslin,

When you talk about the "vocab[ulary] of rights" you have hit the nail on the head, if unwittingly. This "food right" is just empty verbiage, vocabulary unattached to rigorous thinking. A right doesn't exist simply because we speak of it.

Yoshie,

The U.S. language on this stupid Rome accord seems reasonable to me. See above.

Justin Schwartz,

You are opening a whole can of worms with the right to money enough for a living. I agree with you but this is new territory. Credit money, being created by government and bank fiat, is indeed a commodity to which we could establish a general right. It is far different from food because it is itself a contract of sorts. This is the way down which socialism will ultimate travel, in my view.



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