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Comment by emaginniss | Hacker News Reader

For something to be a basic human right, it has to be available without enslaving other people. Free speech - yep, I can speak without forcing anyone else to do anything. Freedom from unreasonable search - yep, I am asking the government to not do something that infringes on my rights. If you start to declare something like housing as a basic human right, then the government has to provide it for you. What if nobody wants to build houses because of your unreasonable taxation strategy that you listed above? Does the government then compel them to build houses? What if the construction workers don't want to put hammer to nail? Does the government enslave them? Be careful what you declare as something that the government owes you, because the government doesn't do anything independently. It is a proxy for other people, so you are essentially saying "everyone else owes me a house and I am willing to use governmental violence to get it."

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If someone needs shelter, what's to stop them from locating a suitable bit of land, scrounging up materials, and constructing a dwelling, through their own energy and ingenuity? Many people try this, but it is the government which stops them, sending police officers and sanitation workers out to "clean up" the "illegal encampment" and remove it from the "public park" or "highway right-of-way" where it was located.

We can see that housing is a right in the same way that freedom from unreasonable search is a right: it is a limit on what the government can do to you. If shelter is a basic right, that means the government cannot force you to be homeless.

A government assumes an obligation to provide housing for its citizens by interfering with their natural ability to provide it for themselves. It is the government which defines the idea of private land ownership, the government which hires police to enforce property boundaries, the government which imposes property taxes, the government which regulates use of public land, the government which enacts zoning codes, the government which requires building permits.

If someone cannot make it through this gauntlet, we cannot demand that they simply lay down and die: government created the problem, so government must solve it. Accepting the existence of shantytowns is one solution; subsidized public housing is another.

> It is a proxy for other people, so you are essentially saying "everyone else owes me a house and I am willing to use governmental violence to get it."

This is pretty much the principle behind distributive and legal justice, expressed crudely. I have no prima facie problem with the idea of a program which is constructed to recognize that everyone is owed shelter, and if it takes declaring that as a "human right" (whatever that might mean) then so be it.

Under the U.S. Constitution, you have a right to an attorney regardless of your ability to pay. Do you think public defenders are enslaved?

My father was. He was a corporate attorney in New Jersey in the 80s and the state ran out of public defenders. The state required that all attorneys that were practicing under the NJ Bar serve as a public defender without pay. They got around the slavery aspect by just encoding it as a requirement for maintaining good standing as an attorney.

That's not slavery.

Your father could've quit, changed careers, moved to another state, etc.

Slaves don't get to do that.

Interesting, federally you get paid [1] but not-federally you don't [2].

[1]: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/3006A [2]: https://law.justia.com/cases/new-jersey/supreme-court/1992/1...

> Does the government enslave them? Be careful what you declare as something that the government owes you, because the government doesn't do anything independently.

How about the police force that protects your exclusive access to land (a natural resource)?

1. The government offers out contracts to build houses

2. People/Companies refuse contracts based on their principals

3. Other People/Companies take up those contracts

4. Those Companies post job openings to build said houses

5. People take said jobs, they can refuse if they don't want to work for a company working for the Govt.

6. Houses get built

Sounds like regular capitalism to me, no one is being forced to do something they don't want.

If the government are building the houses surely that's the will of the people?

The money the governments are using to pay that contract is generally paid by taxes. So if we go back to the originally OPs point. Those taxes are enforced via force. While not as a direct as forcing a worker to build the house directly. One is still essentially working to build these house in this case. For instance on average 5% income was taxes for this purpose you could treat it as 5% decrease in pay or more cyclically 5% of ones labor is unpaid.

However, you can argue this for just about anything the government does with tax money. It's not wrong per se on an item by item basis of government function. Although, ideally government functions benefit everyone in some regard so in practice its not as bleak sounding. Very few people would be hard pressed to receive zero in return from all functions and programs of a government that is not abusive. Although, unless you get one these houses your not getting anything in return here for this hypothetical 5%, again though that is on an item by item basis. There could be tertiary benefits that one gets, but are hard to quantify with a dollar amount if such a program is working well. Such as a more stable community, ect...

And what happens when no construction firms want to build where the govt wants? How are they going to enforce this human rights violation? After they are built, houses constantly need maintenance which means your right to a home is dependent on skilled people who aren't going to work for free unless you make them.

> And what happens when no construction firms want to build where the govt wants?

That seems unlikely.

Reductio ad absurdum arguments don't warrant entertaining.

You make two basic mistakes.

First, your rights end where mine begin. Even free speech doesn't mean you get to shout "bomb!" in a crowded theater without consequences. Likewise, your "right" to say something also doesn't mean I have to hear it.

Anything beyond what you think will at some point infringe the rights of others so there are natural limits.

Second, no "right" is absolute. If happen to believe in the current Supreme Court's interpretation of the Second Amendment (namely that it's an individual right, which, to be clear, I don't) then even that has limits. There are limits on what weapons you can own, you have to be 18+ and you (generally) can't be a felon. There are limits on where you take such firearms (eg try to take a firearm onto a plane).

>Free speech - yep, I can speak without forcing anyone else to do anything.

Great, except this means less than you think. Negative right (e.g. "freedom from X") free speech means that it's 100% legal for Comcast, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, various Mastodon instances[0], that weird Trump-only social network, and whatever other platforms are out there to censor you because they're "not the government" and are merely refusing to publish something rather than banning it with the force of law. Free speech online is entirely a positive right (e.g. "freedom to have X"), because it all relies on private actors cooperating to publish your speech. In a negative-freedom world, the Internet is a censorship hellscape.

Positive freedom to speak would be something like net neutrality - i.e. common carrier rules. Nobody is obligated to provide Internet services, but if they do, they can't arbitrarily refuse service to certain people based purely on the user's speech. Right to shelter could work in a similar fashion - i.e. you don't have to build housing, but if you do, a certain percentage of it needs to be cheap housing. Or, instead of just mandating housing just exist, we just have the government spend a certain amount of tax outlays - that we already collect - on new home construction on the open market. We don't compel the workers to build housing with a gun, we compel them with money, which is a kind of compulsion that even the most free-market capitalist society readily accepts as legitimate.

Conversely, there are also negative-right conceptions of "housing as a human right", too. It could mean, for example, that zoning laws are unconstitutional. Right now there are plenty of government interventions in the housing market that are there to specifically prohibit certain kinds of housing arrangements - usually multi-family units - in certain areas. These arrangements impinge upon the market's ability to actually supply increased demand, and thus drive up the price of housing and price poorer people out of the market. Even if you entirely deny the existence of positive rights, think taxation is theft, and think Murray Rothbard had some good ideas... how is that not a violation of human rights?

[0] Mastodon is federated, but in practice most people use a large instance if they want to be on the Fediverse. It is possible for instance owners to refuse to federate with one another or block specific users from other instances.

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