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Comment by anm89 | Hacker News Reader

>One person's right is always another person's obligation

You are failing to understand the distinction.

All rights and laws depend on governments and courts. That obligation is around interpretation and enforcement, not the provision of the right itself.

My right to free speech does require governments and courts only at the enforcement level. No other person ever has to do anything for me to have that right. In fact I don't have to do anything to have that right. I have it whether I exercise it or not.

The same is not true about housing or food. A court could decide that someone has a right to those things but it's still not going to happen until the resource exists to provide. Someone has to make those things. That's not just enforcement or interpretation. It's buying fertilizer, it's nailing boards together.

>One person's right is always another person's obligation

So no, this fails to hold up to simple scrutiny

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> All rights and laws depend on governments and courts. That obligation is around interpretation and enforcement, not the provision of the right itself.

This distinction doesn't matter. You can't have meaningful, substantive rights, without an adequate governmental budget that is allocating resources toward your specific needs.

If you live in Chinatown (the place in the movie), then you don't have the SUBSTANTIVE right not to be murdered, because the police will enforce nothing. Your rights are taken away in reality.

But in your paper fantasy, you still have the rights because of some paper somewhere, even though you are dead.

In the real world, a right without an enforcement budget is no right at all.

In the US, rights are defined as things in which the government and private parties cannot take away.

As you've stated, a society will break down if there is no enforcement of rights as it is equivalent to them not existing. This is because the government is the sole definer of rights, and they only exist because the government has the will and ability to enforce them.

Neither housing nor water are human rights in the US because they, as the commenter stated, require you infringe on someone else's private property (resources, time) to provide them.

This may be different under other governments depending on how rights are defined in their society, but in the US it is absolutely not the case.

Again, how rights are defined on paper is different from how the real world is.

In the USA, law isn't only defined by statute, it's also defined by the courts through case law.

The courts in the USA have some doctrines like "substantive due process" that say at least sometimes the law will look also at real rights that people can actually exercise, and not just paper rights.

> Neither housing nor water are human rights in the US because they, as the commenter stated, require you infringe on someone else's private property (resources, time) to provide them.

And yet as a matter of inevitable biology, every other right derives from access to water. A person without water lacks all other rights and all capacity for exercise of any right (e.g. speech).

The American court system as defined by corporate statutes has shown itself incapable of, nay, unwilling to uphold rights of the people.

The dead "person" corporation government model has provided a level of abstraction that lends to callous disregard to "un-a-lien-able" rights. It has given the government an interface with which to fasten liens upon people disregarding the Declaration of Independence.

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