Soundings, November 2003

Ecatepec, a city of 2.5 million just north of Mexico City, has found the ultimate solution to official influence-peddling: strip officials of their influence. The first act of Mayor Eruviel Avila Villegas, when he took office last August, was to abolish parking and traffic fines. The object was to halt one of Mexico's most annoying problems: cops demanding bribes. According to the mayor's thinking, if police officers cannot threaten drivers with tickets, they cannot shake them down.

Those in Washington, D.C., who are concerned about organizations buying influence through campaign contributions should take note. As E.L. Godkin said of governmental corruption in the last century: "The remedy is simple. The Government must get out of the 'protective' business and the 'subsidy' business and the 'improvement' business and the 'development' business. It must let trade and commerce, and manufactures, and shipping and rail, and communication alone. It cannot touch them without breeding corruption."

The Wordwatchers' Corner. Most people are now aware of the Left's misleading word usage when it describes a tax cut as a government expense. The underlying assumption is that all money is first and foremost a possession of the government and any dispersal of money to the people who created it is therefore an expenditure on the state's part.

Now, the Left has a new usage, equally deceptive. "House and Senate negotiators working on Medicare legislation say they are seriously considering imposing a co-payment on home health care. . . . But home care agencies and advocates for the elderly criticized the co-payment as a 'sick tax'" (New York Times, October 14, 2003). The assumption, obviously, is that a welfare beneficiary "owns" all the goods and services he needs, and thus any requirement that he pay something for those services is a partial deprivation of his property. In effect, it is a tax on his property.

Combining these two perspectives gives one a fair picture of the Left's utopia. All funds are in the hands of the government, and all human needs are met "free of charge."

(Be a wordwatcher and help us fight conceptual abuse. If you spot an egregious and harmful instance of linguistic distortion, report it to "Soundings," along with full documentation and a concise analysis. The Objectivist Center will pay $25.00 for each entry that is used.)

The acceptance of "positive rights" or "welfare rights"—that is, rights to goods and services—has been common coin in the international arena at least since the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted by the U.N. General Assembly in 1948. Thus, Article 25 of that document states: "(1) Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control."

Now, some people are determined to make something of those words that American diplomats have long treated as just so much good-sounding fluff. After visiting the World Trade Organization's Cancún conference last September, columnist James Pinkerton wrote: "If international lawyers can't turn human rights law into the next launching pad for billion-dollar lawsuits, it won't be for lack of trying. Even now, human rights activists are sloughing off their old preoccupation with protesting and legislating; they're moving, instead, toward the vastly redistributionist—and perhaps vastly profitable—field of lawyering and litigating.

"This shift, from activism in the streets to activism before the bar, came clear to me as I sat through a panel discussion, hosted by the Canadian government, on human rights and international trade. . . .

"What stood out was a passionate presentation by an international lawyer, one Paul Hunt. Hunt isn't well known, but that could change as he pursues his argument, which is that health care is a judicable human right; that is, with enough lawyering, the rich nations of the 'North' could be made to finance the health needs of the poor 'South'" ("The Monster Awakens," wwwtechcentralstation.com., September 18, 2003).

The following poll indicates that most Americans distinguish rather sharply among conventional religious beliefs (God and Satan), pseudo-scientific beliefs (UFOs and astrology), and beliefs now considered superstitious (ghosts and witches). Providing evidence for a premodern-versus-postmodern cultural split, however, is the fact that Republicans are more likely than Democrats to say they believe in the devil (by 17 points), while Democrats are more likely than Republicans to say they believe in astrology (by 14 points). A thoroughly modern, secular view that rejects belief in God is held by so very small a percentage (5 percent) that the poll's 3-percent margin of error makes the size of the group difficult to estimate.