'Tis the Season...to Understand
Individual Rights
By Andrew Bernstein
Most Americans think
slavery ended with the 13th Amendment in 1865. It did, in the United
States. But it is alive and well today in the Sudan and Mauritania.
In these African countries, blacks suffer at the hands of Arabs, who
ransack villages, kill the men and sell the women and children into
slavery. The Arabs use black slaves for labor, sex and breeding. In
1994, Human Rights Watch/Africa labeled Sudan's record on rights
"abysmal," and the situation is little different in
Mauritania.
The facts are readily available from such
organizations as the American Anti-Slavery Group (www.anti-slavery.com), yet the public hears nothing about this
abhorrent practice. Where are the liberals? Where are Hillary
Clinton, Ted Kennedy and Jesse Jackson? Ostensibly, liberals profess
concern for human rights. Why do they not speak out on behalf of the
slaves in Africa?
That they remain silent regarding slavery
while decrying "sweatshops" provides a clue. American-owned
factories in Asia and elsewhere employ local workers in jobs whose
conditions and salaries do not approach those in the United States.
The liberals demand that such "exploitation" cease. But workers
accept these jobs voluntarily, because they offer better
opportunities than the alternatives available in those primitive
economies. In endorsing policies that would effectively close these
factories, the liberals violate not only the rights of the
employers, but also the rights of the workers to accept employment
on the terms offered.
Why object to voluntary employment but
remain silent regarding slavery? It looks like a terrible
inconsistency. But is it? A closer look shows that liberals
consistently endorse the violation of the rights of the very people
they profess to protect.
For example, at home, too, the
liberal claims to be a defender of workers, but in fact negates the
individual rights of each worker. Liberals uphold such laws as the
minimum-wage requirement, which abrogates the freedom of a
low-skilled worker to accept the kind of employment offered to him.
Since someone whose work is worth only, say, $5.00 an hour to an
employer will be unable to find work at a higher wage, the
predictable result of minimum-wage laws is higher unemployment among
lower-skilled workers. By eradicating a worker's freedom in this
regard, they deny him both employment and the chance at on-the-job
training that would upgrade his skills.
Similarly, liberals
champion the political power of labor unions. But unions deny the
right of individual workers to make their own agreements with the
employer on the terms of work. Time and again, striking unions use
violence to prevent workers from crossing a picket line. The
liberals say nothing as such victims are physically harassed and
even beaten. In the name of "workers' rights," liberals nullify the
actual rights of the individual worker to choose for himself what
conditions of employment to accept.
Nor is it merely the
rights of the workers that liberals abrogate. For instance, though
they claim to defend the elderly, they oppose the privatization of
Social Security. This means they negate the right of each individual
to use his own money to plan for his own retirement. They negate the
right of the individual to take responsibility for the course of his
own life.
Why do liberals pay lip service to supporting the
poor, the elderly, the worker—while invariably endorsing the
violation of the rights of those very individuals? The answer is
that liberals repudiate the principle of individual rights in favor
of collectivism. Only groups exist in their thinking, and only
"group rights" are valid. They see life only in terms of
collectives—the rich versus the poor, the young versus the elderly,
the whites versus the blacks. Individuals have no reality and no
meaning to them.
Therefore, liberals blithely violate the
rights of individual workers whenever they believe that "labor as a
whole" will somehow benefit. Similarly, they ignore slavery in the
Sudan and Mauritania, because they believe that to criticize any
groups in Africa is to undermine the cause of ethnic minorities in
the West (and in Israel). The interests of enslaved black
individuals are thus sacrificed to the liberals' vision of a greater
"collective good."
These injustices will continue until the
liberals' collectivism is rejected in favor of the principle of
individualism. Only when it is understood that each and every
individual has inalienable rights can mankind eradicate the
egregious violations perpetrated by the liberals or sanctioned by
their silence.
--Andrew Bernstein is a senior writer for
the Ayn Rand Institute in Marina del Rey,
Calif. The Institute promotes the philosophy of Ayn Rand, author of
Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead.
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