If one person has a right to something he did not earn, of necessity it requires that another person not have a right to something that he did earn.
Interpretation
The quote highlights the conflict between rights and earned benefits, suggesting that unfairness occurs when one person's rights infringe on another's rightful possessions.
Walter E. Williams emphasizes the inherent injustice in claiming entitlements that one has not earned, suggesting that such claims inherently take away rights from others who have rightfully earned their possessions. This highlights a fundamental principle in discussions about fairness, property rights, and individual responsibility in society, where one individual's gain can often result in another's loss when rights are redistributed without regard for merit.
In practice
This quote can be used in a debate about welfare policies.
However, if we wish to be compassionate with our fellow man, we must learn to engage in dispassionate analysis. In other words, thinking with our hearts, rather than our brains, is a surefire method to hurt those whom we wish to help.
In a free society, government has the responsibility of protecting us from others, but not from ourselves.
What we call the market is really a democratic process involving millions, and in some markets billions, of people making personal decisions that express their preferences. When you hear someone say that he doesn't trust the market, and wants to replace it with government edicts, he's really calling for a switch from a democratic process to a totalitarian one.
The true test of one's commitment to liberty and private property rights doesn't come when we permit people to be free to do those voluntary things with which we agree. The true test comes when we permit people to be free to do those voluntary things with which we disagree.
Powerful government tends to draw into it people with bloated egos, people who think they know more than everyone else and have little hesitance in coercing their fellow man. Or as Nobel Laureate Friedrich Hayek said, "in government, the scum rises to the top".
The essence of government is force, and most often that force is used to accomplish evil ends.
It is no coincidence that a rebirth of psychedelic use is occuring as we acquire the technological capability to leave the planet. The mushroom visions and the transformation of the human image precipitated by space exploration are spun together. Nothing less is happening than the emergence of a new human order. A telepathic, humane, universalist kind of human culture is emerging that will make everything that preceded it appear like the stone age.
We may, perhaps, imagine that the creation was finished long ago. But that would be quite wrong. It continues still more magnificently, and at the highest levels of the world.
How do we remember to remember? That's a question I've asked myself often since my time on Duma Key, often in the small hours of the morning, looking up into the absence of light, remembering absent friends. Sometimes in those little hours I think about the horizon. You have to establish the horizon. You have to mark the white. A simple enough act, you might say, but any act that re-makes the world is heroic. Or so I've come to believe.
There is an element of truth in every idea that lasts long enough to be called corny.
When a man takes an oath... he's holding his own self in his own hands. Like water.
Celebrity distorts democracy by giving the rich, beautiful, and famous more authority than they deserve.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.