Quote of the Day: Entitle-itis v rights

“Since the things man needs for survival have to be produced, and nature does not guarantee the success of any human endeavour, there is not and cannot be any such thing as a guaranteed economic security. The employer who gives you a job, has no guarantee that his business will remain in existence, that his customers will continue to buy his products or services. The customers have no guarantee that they will always be able and willing to trade with him, no guarantee of what their needs, choices and incomes will be in the future. If you retire to a self-sustaining farm, you have no guarantee to protect you from what a flood or a hurricane might do to your land and your crops. If you surrender everything to the government and give it total power to plan the whole economy, this will not guarantee your economic security, but it will guarantee the descent of the entire nation to a level of miserable poverty—as the practical results of every totalitarian economy, communist or fascist, have demonstrated.
    “Morally, the promise of an impossible ‘right’ to economic security is an infamous attempt to abrogate the concept of rights. It can and does mean only one thing: a promise to enslave the men who produce, for the benefit of those who don’t. ‘If some men are entitled by right to the products of the work of others, it means that those others are deprived of rights and condemned to slave labour.’ (“Man’s Rights” in ‘Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal’) There can be no such thing as the right to enslave, i.e., the right to destroy rights.”
~ Ayn Rand, from ‘A Preview’ in her Ayn Rand Letter

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