Govt Creating Rights and Duties Destroys Other Rights and the Elements of Freedom. (ie: Welfare State)

"The fundamental moral law which forbids governments to create rights and duties, should be plainly obvious to everyone. However, [p. 138] because people tend to fix their attention on the creation of rights, and fail to recognize that rights cannot exist without duties, the necessity of obeying this moral law is not clearly seen.

It is impossible for rights to exist in one person unless there are corresponding duties in others. Therefore, when governments “create rights,” they must at the same time, “create duties.” But when they create duties, they destroy rights. Those upon whom the “created duties” are imposed, lose their rights just as surely as if government had passed a law taking them directly. Thus it is impossible for government to create a right in one person without destroying the right of another.

An explanation of what happens when rights are created under a welfare state law will make this clear. When such a law is passed, it provides welfare benefits for some group. But at the same time other laws must be enacted which compels taxpayers to pay those benefits. Government cannot possibly give to one, that which it does not take from another. But this is a forcible taking of property to pay debts not owed, and the obligor is unjustly deprived of an element of freedom.

When government takes property from a person only to the extent necessary to enforce existing duties, the one from whom it is taken loses nothing to which he is entitled because no one has a right to refuse to perform a duty. But if force is used to compel the performance of duties not owed, at that point government crosses that precise line which divides the protection of rights from their destruction, and acts directly contrary to the purpose for which it is formed.

Those in government have no more authority to arbitrarily impose new duties than do the citizens they represent. If an individual undertook to impose and enforce a duty to which he had no right, his act would be regarded as a crime. It is no less so when performed by men acting in the name of government. Since citizens have no power to create rights, and since the only powers governments possess are those given them by the people, the creation of rights by government is a usurpation of power.

Men surrender none of their rights when they establish government. They merely delegate to that agency the power of enforcing existing rights. Neither do they assume any new duties. In the absence of government, each man would be under the necessity of enforcing and protecting his own rights—and doubtless at great cost. Therefore, when we support government we do not perform a new duty. We only discharge in a more effective and economical manner an obligation which [p. 139] already existed—that of protecting our own rights. These fundamental truths underlie the American constitutional system of government and are expressed in the Declaration of Independence in these words:

That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that, whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute a new government . . .

Jefferson, who is generally regarded as the author of the above words, provided a more complete exposition of his views in a letter written to Francis Gilmer in 1816 which reads in part as follows:

Our legislators are not sufficiently apprized of the rightful limits of their power; that their true office is to declare and enforce only our natural rights and duties, and to take none of them from us.

No man has a natural right to commit aggression on the equal rights of another; and this is all from which the laws ought to restrain him; every man is under the natural duty of contributing to the necessities of the society; and this is all the laws should enforce on him; and, no man having a natural right to be the judge between himself and another, it is his natural duty to submit to the umpirage of an impartial third.

When the laws have declared and enforced all this, they have fulfilled their functions, and the idea is quite unfounded, that on entering into society we give up any natural right. The trial of every law by one of these tests, would lessen much the labors of the legislators, and lighten equally our municipal codes, m (Works of Thomas Jefferson, Federal Edition, G.P. Putnam & Sons, [1905], V. XI, PP. 533-534)

Since no person whether within government or without, can honestly claim that he would consider it just to have others impose duties upon him which he had never agreed to and did not owe, he cannot in good conscience favor laws which do that very thing unto others. Such would be an obvious violation of the principle of the Golden Rule which requires that we treat others as we would be treated." Source