There is very little either complicated or interesting about poverty. Poverty has been man’s condition throughout his history. The causes of poverty are quite simple and straightforward. Generally, individual people or entire nations are poor for one or more of the following reasons: (1) they cannot produce many things highly valued by others; (2) they can produce things valued by others but they are prevented from doing so; or (3) they volunteer to be poor.

The true mystery is why there is any affluence at all. That is, how did a tiny proportion of man’s population (mostly in the West) for only a tiny part of man’s history (mainly in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries) manage to escape the fate of their fellow men?

Sometimes, in reference to the United States, people point to its rich endowment of natural resources. This explanation is unsatisfactory. Were abundant natural resources the cause of affluence, Africa and South America would stand out as the richest continents, instead of being home to some of the world’s most miserably poor people. By contrast, that explanation would suggest that resource-poor countries like Japan, Hong Kong, and Great Britain should be poor instead of ranking among the world’s richest places.

Another unsatisfactory explanation of poverty is colonialism. This argument suggests that third-world poverty is a legacy of having been colonized, exploited, and robbed of its riches by the mother country. But it turns out that countries like the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand were colonies; yet they are among the world’s richest countries. Hong Kong was a colony of Great Britain until 1997, when China regained sovereignty, but it managed to become the second richest political jurisdiction in the Far East. On the other hand, Ethiopia, Liberia, Tibet, and Nepal were never colonies, or were so for only a few years, and they rank among the world’s poorest and most backward countries.

Despite the many justified criticisms of colonialism and, I might add, multinationals, both served as a means of transferring Western technology and institutions, bringing backward peoples into greater contact with a more-developed Western world. A tragic fact is that many African countries have suffered significant decline since independence. In many of those countries the average citizen can boast that he ate more regularly and enjoyed greater human-rights protections under colonial rule. The colonial powers never perpetrated the unspeakable human rights abuses, including genocide, that we have seen in post-independence Burundi, Uganda, Zimbabwe, Sudan, Central African Empire, Somalia, and elsewhere.

Any economist who suggests he has a complete answer to the causes of affluence should be viewed with suspicion. We do not know fully what makes some societies richer than others. However, we can make guesses based on correlations. Start out by ranking countries according to their economic systems. Conceptually we could arrange them from more capitalistic (having a larger free-market sector) to more communistic (with extensive State intervention and planning). Then consult Amnesty International’s ranking of countries according to human-rights abuses. Then get World Bank income statistics and rank countries from highest to lowest per capita income.

Compiling the three lists, one would observe a very strong, though imperfect, correlation: Those countries with greater economic liberty tend also to have stronger protections of human rights. And their people are wealthier. That finding is not a coincidence, so let us speculate on the relationship.

Rights and Prosperity

One way to gauge human-rights protection is to ask to what extent the State protects voluntary exchange and private property. These signify the rights to acquire, keep, and dispose of property in any fashion so long as one does not violate the rights of others. The difference between private property rights and collectively held rights is not simply philosophical. Private property produces systemically different incentives and results from collective property.

Since collectivists often trivialize private property rights, they are worth elaborating. When property rights are held privately the costs and benefits of decisions are concentrated in the individual decision maker; with collectively held property rights they are dispersed across society. For example, private property forces homeowners to take into account the effect of their current decisions on the future value of their homes, because that value depends, among other things, on how long the property will provide housing services. Thus privately owned property holds one’s personal wealth hostage to doing the socially responsible thing—economizing scarce resources.

Contrast these incentives to those of collective ownership. When the government owns the house, the individual has less incentive to take care of it simply because he does not capture the full benefit of his efforts. It is dispersed across society instead. The costs of neglecting the house are similarly spread. You do not have to be a rocket scientist to predict that under these circumstances, less care will be taken.

Nor is nominal collective ownership the only force that weakens social responsibility. When government taxes property, it changes the ownership characteristics. If government were to impose a 75 percent tax on a person selling his house, it would reduce his incentive to use the house wisely.

This argument applies to all activities, including work and investment. Whatever lowers the return from or raises the cost of an investment reduces incentives to make that investment in the first place. This applies to investment in human as well as physical capital—that is, those activities that raise the productive capacity of individuals.

To a significant degree the wealth of nations is embodied in their people. The starkest example of this is the experience of the Germans and Japanese after World War II. During the war, Allied bombing missions destroyed nearly the entire physical stock of each country. What was not destroyed was the human capital of the people: their skills and education. In two or three decades, both countries reemerged as formidable economic forces. The Marshall Plan and other U.S. subsidies to Europe and Japan cannot begin to explain their recovery.

Proper identification of the causes of poverty is critical. If it is seen, as is too often the case, as a result of exploitation, the policy recommendation that naturally emerges is income redistribution—that is, government confiscation of some people’s “ill-gotten” gains and “restoration” to their “rightful” owners. This is the politics of envy: bigger and bigger welfare programs domestically and bigger and bigger foreign-aid programs internationally.

If poverty is correctly seen as a result of the unwise government intervention and lack of productive capacity, more effective policy recommendations emerge.

China can be proud of the rapid economic progress it has made since 1978, when it was still a centrally planned economy with little foreign trade. Today, as the world’s second-largest economy, the People’s Republic (PRC) has gained wealth but not freedom. The Chinese people have a vastly wider range of economic and social opportunities than under the dictatorship of Mao Zedong, but their basic human rights continue to be denied by a ruling party determined to maintain its monopoly on power.

As head of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), Hu has paid lip service to “putting the people first,” but there has been little progress in liberalizing the political regime. The reality is that his idea of a “harmonious society” is one directed by the ruling elite, in which order emerges from the top down, not spontaneously under a constitution of liberty.

One of the CCP’s long-held tenets is “to seek truth from facts.” The most glaring fact is not the inequality of wealth, but the inequality of power that strips the Chinese people of their fundamental rights. Putting the people first means limiting government power and safeguarding rights to life, liberty, and property.

The great Chinese liberal Lao-Tzu understood the importance of freedom and limited government. For him and other Taoists, harmony cannot be forced; it must be natural. In the Laozi, also known as the Tao Te Ching, we read: “The more restrictions and prohibitions there are in the world, the poorer the people will be.” Denying individuals the liberty to exchange ideas, to criticize the government and party, and to associate freely without the fear of repression makes people poorer by restricting the alternatives open to them.

In 2004 the National People’s Congress (NPC), China’s rubber-stamp parliament, amended the PRC Constitution to better protect the private sector and for the first time added the words “human rights” to the document. Article 33, section 3, reads, “The state respects and protects human rights.” Such language encouraged Chinese liberals to test the waters, only to find that reality did not match the rhetoric.

The drafting of Charter 08, a manifesto for fundamental human rights, earned Liu Xiaobo the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize, the first awarded to a Chinese citizen. It also earned him 11 years in prison. The empty chair at the Nobel ceremony was yet one more iconic image of the individual versus the State. Before his sentencing in 2009 Liu stood before the court and declared, “To block freedom of speech is to trample on human rights, to strangle humanity, and to suppress the truth.”

Like others before him, Liu was accused of “incitement to subvert state power.” Yet the Chinese people have always believed that when government acts unjustly it loses the Mandate of Heaven. Charter 08 recognizes that “China has many laws but no rule of law.” The charter, initially signed by 303 liberals, now has more than 10,000 signatories—all of whom recognize that people everywhere have the rights “to freedom, to property, and to the pursuit of happiness.”

Charter 08 and Preexisting Rights

Charter 08 reveals an acute understanding of the case for limited government and the principle that the legitimate function of the State is to protect preexisting rights to life, liberty, and property, not to deny those rights. Civil society requires freedom. To achieve that freedom Charter 08 advocates a constitutional democracy with separation of powers, an independent judiciary, and a bill of rights. Freedom of expression, of religion, of association, and the protection of private property are all enshrined in the document. The hope of the Chinese framers is that Charter 08 will “bring to reality the goals and ideals that our people have incessantly been seeking for more than a hundred years, and . . . bring a brilliant new chapter to Chinese civilization.”

The official reaction to Charter 08 and to Liu’s Nobel Peace Prize was predictable: The Chinese government launched a storm of propaganda in support of the status quo. The mouthpiece of the CCP, the People’s Daily, wrote in October 2010, “By rumor-mongering and libeling, the charter denies the people’s democratic dictatorship, socialism, and the unitary state structure stipulated in the Chinese Constitution. The charter also entices people to join it, with the intent to alter the political system and overturn the government. Liu’s activities have crossed the line of freedom of speech into crime.”

Top-Down Order and Human Happiness

Yet as Premier Wen Jiabao noted last August in a speech in Shenzhen, “Without the safeguard of political reform, the fruits of economic reform would be lost and the goal of modernization would not materialize.” And in an interview with CNN in October, he recognized that “freedom of speech is indispensable for any country.”

The harmony, stability, and peaceful development that Beijing seeks will be on shaky ground until the CCP confronts the reality that top-down order is not consistent with human happiness, and that spontaneous order emerges from free markets and a genuine rule of law. Premier Wen, in his 2003 speech at Harvard, said that China has “found the right path of development” and that “the essence of this path is to . . . respect and protect the freedom of the Chinese people to pursue happiness.” In 2007, following the annual session of the NPC, he encouraged people to “oversee and criticize the government,” and said, “It is particularly important that we need to make justice the most important value of the socialist system.”

Justice, however, requires the prevention of injustice. Liu Xiaobo, Gao Zhisheng, and others entrapped by China’s jackboot justice system deserve to be heard, as do “the lost souls” of Tiananmen.

Chauffour first explains the history of thought behind the idea that economic development itself is a human right. Advocates of that view focus on attaining “positive rights”–that is, a right to have things regarded as necessary for a good life. That notion has strong roots in socialism. Many regimes give high priority to these positive rights, but they necessarily violate true human rights in order to sustain their political agendas. Even in its less extreme forms, the “positive rights” approach to development inevitably designates some government force that is supposed to be capable of ruling in the interest of citizens, instead of permitting them to pursue their own interests as they would under a “negative rights” regime.

In advancing his argument that economic development will result from individual liberty, Chauffour uses the insights of the Austrian school of economics. He illustrates that policies intended to promote human-rights agendas are plagued with both knowledge and coordination problems. He incorporates many of F. A. Hayek’s ideas, which both cast doubt on the political feasibility of government-directed development and point out the logical inconsistencies of systems based simultaneously on positive and negative rights.

Crucially, Chauffour emphasizes that simply proclaiming that all individuals possess certain positive rights, such as freedom from hunger, does not provide governments with the resources or the knowledge necessary to guarantee those things. The mere act of declaring something to be either a right or an obligation does not help anyone, except perhaps the politicians. Chauffour might have strengthened his point here by arguing that declaring an obligation that is impossible to fulfill, such as that employers must pay “decent wages,” may be harmful in underdeveloped societies. Giving people the expectation that they are entitled to specific outcomes breeds inertia and inaction.

While most of the book is about the harm done by positive rights-based policies and how negative rights are more logically consistent than positive rights, Chauffour asserts that “it is a fact that the protection of certain negative rights cannot be ensured without positive actions by the state.” In saying that, he sells short private solutions that can emerge to solve complex property-rights issues that most governments struggle to control via regulation. Even in developing countries, the free market works well to devise protections for property rights, and Chauffour could have strengthened his case for laissez faire by noting that.

Another difficulty is that Chauffour seems to underestimate the challenges of making the transition from a society dominated by “positive rights” thinking and intrusive government to one where individual rights are upheld. Major development successes will happen when societies embrace economic freedom, but how do we create the institutional context under which people (and especially their rulers) who have been accustomed to strong government control will throw off those shackles and embrace freedom? Chauffor’s diagnosis is right and the prescription is right, but can the patient be induced to take the medicine?

Following the devastation of the earthquake in Haiti, this is a particularly good time to read The Power of Freedom. Haiti is a desperately impoverished nation, and that poverty has made the death toll far greater than it would have been in a wealthier, modernized nation. Haiti has received great amounts of foreign aid but that has not translated into economic development. Moreover, the nation ranks low on indices of economic freedom, particularly in terms of property-rights protection. Perhaps this tragedy will at least cause some development experts to consider Chauffour’s point that freedom will allow poor people to start advancing economically, whereas looking to government to catalyze development is certain to lead to disappointment.

Does anyone still think the “war on drugs” is a good idea?

That may strike some people as an odd question under the circumstances, so let’s take it from another direction. Have you seen the news stories about the violence on the border being perpetrated by the Mexican whiskey and cigarette cartels?

No? That’s probably because there was no such violence and are no such cartels.

So why are there violent cartels in marijuana, cocaine, and heroin but not in whiskey and cigarettes?

All together now: prohibition.

“Our” Fault?

Of course the politicians blame everything and everyone but themselves for this spreading violence. “Our insatiable demand for illegal drugs fuels the drug trade,” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said. “Our demand”? Including hers? “Our inability to prevent weapons from being illegally smuggled across the border to arm these criminals causes the deaths of police officers, soldiers and civilians.” Her answer, in addition to sending the Mexican government taxpayer money, is to go after consumers of drugs and manufacturers and dealers of guns she doesn’t like.

Drug users and gun dealers are to blame for drug-cartel violence? That makes no sense. If it did, then drinkers and smokers would be creating violence, too. What’s missing?

Once again in unison: prohibition. Who brought us prohibition? Politicians. Every politician, bureaucrat, and agent who facilitates or enforces prohibition is an accomplice in the violence because he or she helps to create the conditions in which thugs have a comparative advantage in dealing drugs.

For years advocates of free trade in drugs—that is, basic rights to life, liberty, and property for drug consumers, producers, and merchants—have pointed out that prohibition, besides being an immoral invasion of liberty by the state, sets in motion a variety of concrete evils that harm innocent people. (No one has been more consistent and rigorous in this than Thomas Szasz). These evils include the corruption of law enforcement, violent crime, and the expansion of intrusive government. Besides these domestic evils, the U.S. government has alienated farmers in foreign lands by helping to destroy their crops and livelihoods. If that’s not terrorism, nothing is. Crop destruction has been a recruiting tool for guerilla organizations, while black-market profits finance them and others with malign intent.

Few listened to these Cassandras against the anti-drug crusade. Maybe people will listen now.

Government Impotence

While violent gangs that make their money selling drugs in the black market are murdering and kidnapping people, invading homes, and committing other atrocities, the politicians have nothing to say but the same bromides they’ve been repeating for years. Thinking we’re either simpletons or amnesiacs, they expect us to be comforted by their words. (Will they be right?) They promise to defeat the cartels, crack down on drug use, and disrupt the gun trade. It won’t work. It’s never worked. It can’t work. Black-market operators are always steps ahead of the plodding bureaucrats. Break up one gang and another emerges. The drugs keep flowing (there’s plenty of bribe money), and consumers will have what they want when they want it. The profits made possible by the black market are powerful incentives to keep the industry going. Government is impotent. (They can’t even keep drugs out of prisons!)

Yet the gangs could be put out of business overnight. How? By removing the criminal penalties for the production, trade, and consumption of all drugs; by bringing the black market into the open, so disagreements can be resolved through civil channels and a talent for violence is no longer an advantage; by dissolving the extraordinary profits that illegal industries always reap.

Yes, it is that easy.

People will recoil. We can’t do that! No? Then accept as normal the unspeakable violence that is starting to spread from city to city, because that is the alternative to the stubborn refusal to end the “war on drugs,” which is really a war on people. Even full police-state tactics will not be able to control it, though that won’t stop demagogic politicians from giving them a try.

The Drug War Finances Government Careers

I don’t expect the multitude of officials who depend on the drug war for their livelihoods and power to endorse an end to prohibition. They have shown themselves more than willing to accept the violence (against others) as the price of their ambition. The new threat to us is an opportunity for them to amass more power, bigger budgets, and higher salaries.

But the rest of us have no reason to support the complex of government and “private” tax-financed agencies that grow fat prosecuting this war. The worn-out rationalizations can’t stand examination. Prohibition keeps no one from getting any drug he wants at an affordable price. On the contrary, it encourages the creation of cheaper, more potent drugs, just as alcohol prohibition replaced wine and beer with hard liquor. (More bang in a more compact form.) Prohibition doesn’t keep our children safe. It makes drugs into enticing forbidden fruits and pushes the trade into less-visible channels. Drugs aren’t “dangerous,” though people are capable of doing harmful things with them—and many other things. (Jacob Sullum’s Saying Yes is an eye-opening book that I highly recommend.) Addiction is not a disease; it’s a choice.

Everything the drug warriors have said is wrong—and often a conscious lie.

Drugs are to our society what Eurasia and East Asia were to Oceania in Orwell’s 1984: a convenient conjured-up demon to justify expansion of power and the usurping of liberty—in the name of keeping us safe.

What will it take, if not the current violence from Mexico, to make people see through the scam?

Look around. It’s our self-proclaimed protectors from whom need we protection most.

People often suggest that our health-care system’s problems stem from the fact that we have a free market; hence, their solution is to move to socialized medicine, where everyone has a right to a certain level of health care. The problem with that assessment is that our health-care system is not a free-market system. Over 50 percent of health-care expenditures are made by government at various levels, and there is extensive government regulation and control. Most of the problems of health care can be directly connected to that fact.

But there is a much more important question, not given much discussion, that will be the focus of this article.

Do people possess a right to health care whether they can afford it or not? If you believe the 2008 presidential aspirants, the answer is yes. In a Wisconsin campaign speech Senator Hillary Clinton said, “I believe health care is a right, not a privilege. And I will not rest until every American is covered.” In a campaign speech in Iowa, Senator Barack Obama said, “I believe that every American has the right to affordable health care.” While Senator John McCain has not said health care is a right, he nonetheless proposes greater government involvement. Many Americans share the vision that health care is a right. Let us try to decide what is or is not a right.

Imagine that I meet an attractive young lady and ask her to date me. Suppose she refuses. Have my rights been violated? Or suppose I ask to live in your house, and you say no. Have you violated my rights to decent housing? Finally, suppose I knock on your door and tell you I am hungry and wish to share dinner with you and your family. If you refuse, have you violated my rights? I am sure that most Americans, including Senators Clinton, Obama, and McCain, would agree that I have no constitutional, human, or natural right to date someone, or to live in someone’s house, or dine with him. But why?

Rights and Obligations

True rights, such as those in our Constitution, or those considered to be natural or human rights, exist simultaneously among people. The exercise of a right by one person does not diminish those held by another. It imposes no obligations on another except those of non-interference. I have a right to ask a lady for a date, but I have no right to impose an obligation on her to actually date me. Similarly, I have a right to ask you to permit me to live in your house and dine with your family, but I have no right to impose such an obligation on you. Moreover, since I do not have these rights, I do not have a right to delegate authority to government to impose such obligations on another. In other words, from a moral point of view, one can delegate only those rights that one possesses.

To argue that people have a right that imposes obligations on another is absurd. This can be readily seen if we apply such an idea to my rights to speech or travel. Under that vision, my right to free speech would require government-imposed obligations on others to provide me with an auditorium, television studio, or radio station. My right to travel freely would require government-imposed obligations on others to provide me with airfare and hotel accommodations.

For government to guarantee a “right” to health care, or any other good or service, whether a person can afford it or not, it must diminish someone else’s rights, namely his rights to his earnings. The reason is that government has no resources of its own. Moreover, there is no Santa Claus or Tooth Fairy giving the government those resources. The fact that government has no resources of its own forces one to recognize that for government to give one American citizen a dollar, it must first, through intimidation, threats, and coercion, confiscate that dollar from some other American. In other words, if one person has a right to something he did not earn, it of necessity requires another person not to have a right to something that he did earn.

A better term for these new-fangled rights to health care, decent housing, and food is “wishes.” If we called them wishes, I would be in agreement with Clinton, Obama, McCain, and others. I also wish everyone had adequate health care, decent housing, and nutritious meals. However, if we called them wishes, there would be confusion and cognitive dissonance among people calling for socialized medicine. The average American would cringe at the thought of government punishing one person because he refused to make someone else’s wish come true.

For example, if I simply had a wish for a palatial house and a Rolls Royce in my driveway, and Congress told its agents at the IRS to take other people’s money to make my wish come true, I am sure the average American would be offended. Americans would find it easier to live with their consciences, and find congressional initiation of force against others more palatable, if it were alleged that I have a constitutional “right” to a palatial house and a Rolls Royce. After all the primary job of government is to protect rights.

We can evaluate the morality of rights versus wishes another way. Suppose someone initiated force to prevent another from exercising his speech rights and another stepped in to protect that person’s right to speak. Would the intervener be seen as a hero or villain? Most people would answer hero. Then suppose someone saw a homeless person in need of health care and did privately exactly what government does—initiate force to take someone else’s money to provide that homeless person with medical services. Would that person be seen as a hero or villain? Most people, at least I hope so, would see that person as a villain. That is, taking the rightful property of one person to give to another, to whom it does not belong, is considered theft, and it is theft even if the proceeds are used for selfless purposes. It is theft whether two people or 300 million people agree to taking another’s property.

Finally, charitable efforts to help one’s fellow man in need are noble. Reaching into one’s own pockets to help is praiseworthy and laudable. Reaching into someone else’s pockets to do so is despicable and worthy of condemnation.

Opioid analgesics are a class of medications, which includes morphine and oxycodone. In lay terms they are recognized as endorphins. After centuries of successful use they remain the cornerstone in the treatment of chronic pain. They are natural substances that the body itself uses in the regulation of pain. When used as directed by a physician, opioids are categorically safe, and addiction is a vanishingly rare side effect.

The failure of physicians to prescribe opioid medications in quantities sufficient to control chronic pain is the immediate cause of the epidemic. The deeper causes are attributable to social forces, the most significant of which is the intrusion of the war on drugs into the medical profession and the relationship between the physician and his patient.

Most people believe that if they develop chronic pain, their physician will take care of them. They are sadly mistaken. Both scientific and anecdotal evidence inform us that chronic pain is ineffectively treated. The previously mentioned “Roadblocks” survey reveals, alarmingly, that the more severe a patient’s pain is, the less likely the sufferer will be to obtain relief. This experience is described by patients all around the country who can’t find a physician willing to risk prescribing the amounts of opioids necessary to bring their disease under control.

The behavior of the medical profession in its approach to the treatment of chronic pain extends far beyond neglect. Many physicians accept patients suffering from severe chronic pain into their practices. But they rarely treat these patients with dosages of medications that will allow them to return to productive lives. Instead, these unfortunate souls are subjected to a series of abuses that systematically violate their basic human rights.

This seems shocking and unbelievable. Here’s how it works. Physicians are actually trained to scrutinize patients for signs of impending drug addiction. This is accomplished through the use of a set of “aberrant drug-related behaviors.” These behaviors are essentially measures of compliance. Apart from pain management, compliance with medical treatment is generally thought to be in the patient’s best interest and is voluntary.

This is consistent with the principles of informed consent and patient autonomy, which are pillars of ethical practice. Around the issue of pain management, however, compliance takes a strange twist. It becomes, as we will see, a prerequisite for further treatment. It also becomes less than voluntary. The classic examples of “aberrant” behavior occur when a patient uses up his pain medications and either calls in “early” for a refill or asks his physician for a larger prescription. The list of “aberrant” behaviors for which physicians are trained to be vigilant extends to a number of other supposed transgressions, such as a request by a patient for a specific medication that the patient knows from past experience will work. Physicians are trained to regard these sorts of reasonable conduct as a sign of addiction or possibly even of illegal diversion of pharmaceuticals to the black market.

Physicians are both trained and required to react to these behaviors by imposing structure and sanctions. Structure may take the form of more frequent visits to receive smaller amounts of medication and intrusions into patient privacy that may include unannounced pill counts and mandatory drug testing. Many physicians keep a log of transgressions and employ a “three strikes and you’re out policy,” terminating opioid treatment after three supposed transgressions.

All of this places the pain sufferer in a terrible bind. If he can’t obtain the medications he needs in sufficient quantity, he can’t live a normal life. On the other hand, he isn’t allowed to ask for it. If he makes his needs known, he runs the risk of being accused of addiction and criminality, and of being cut off from treatment entirely. As a result, undertreated patients suffering from chronic pain who need to ask for increased dosages are truly damned if they do and damned if they don’t. Under these circumstances, it is not surprising that surveys reveal widespread undertreatment of this disease, particularly among those most severely afflicted.

This conduct is required of physicians by guidelines set out by academic pain specialists and their organizations. It is an abomination that systematically violates the central ethical obligations of the physician to his patient. These obligations include putting the patient’s interests first and controlling pain. Informed consent and patient autonomy, the pillars on which ethical medicine is based, are abrogated as compliance is replaced by coercion.

Among pain victims, this results in bewilderment, increased pain, progressive disability, and general deterioration of health.

One may reasonably conclude that pain management, as it is currently practiced, is a sham. Patients who approach their physicians expecting they will receive pain control are instead subjected to an abusive program of drug control that systematically violates their basic human rights. Chronic pain sufferers are accurately characterized, along with their well-intentioned but nevertheless abusive physicians, as noncombatant casualties in the war on drugs.

The Root of the Problem

The Controlled Substances Act of 1970 assigned the criminal justice system the responsibility of regulating controlled substances. In so doing, law enforcement was inadvertently established in its current role as the regulator of medical practice. Legislative intent was to leave the practice of medicine unmolested. Instead, the law of unintended consequences, which apparently accompanies all drug-war–related endeavors, prevailed. Here’s how it happened.

A safe harbor provision for the medical use of opioids was inserted into the act. The provision states that physicians may prescribe these medications in the usual course of their professional practice. That sounds pretty good on the surface, but that is only before one comes to understand the consequences. This provision implicitly, but unavoidably, requires that law enforcement distinguish between medical practice and drug dealing. Regardless of what one might choose to call this, the result is that law enforcement regulates the practice of medicine. Naturally, law enforcement carries out this task through the use of criminal prosecutions against physicians. It couldn’t be otherwise. When society assigns law enforcement to regulate an issue, criminal prosecutions necessarily result.

The unfortunate truth underlying the pain crisis is the fact that it is impossible to regulate medicines without also regulating the practice of medicine.

Every doctor who contemplates treating chronic pain with opioid analgesics must answer the following question to his own satisfaction: By engaging in this practice, might he be misperceived by medical regulators, in this case law enforcement, as a criminal? By prescribing opioids, is he risking his career, his livelihood, his freedom, and perhaps even his life? The answer comes down to one issue. Is the safe harbor promised by the Controlled Substances Act really safe? Can law enforcement be counted on to regulate the practice of medicine correctly? Is this even a reasonable expectation?

Physicians are good at assessing risk. This is a large part of the work they do in their professional lives. As a group, physicians seem to understand that their risk of unwarranted prosecution is real and unacceptable. They demonstrate this through their prescribing behavior or, in the case of pain management, their failure to prescribe. Many physicians may not say that this is why they undertreat chronic pain or even admit that they undertreat the disease at all, but their collective inaction speaks louder than words. The facts revealed by the surveys of pain victims are as irrefutable as the stories of abuse and undertreatment told by the individual victims of this deadly disease.

Lack of Social Conscience

While most think of medicine as an institution that can be expected to respect human rights, this is a misconception. Medicine as an institution is not possessed of a social conscience. Instead, it reacts to existing social forces, and in this sense the behavior of physicians is best understood as a reflection of the core values of society. Unfortunately, society currently places its highest value on the control of drugs including opioids, which are incorrectly regarded as dangerous and highly addictive.

The medical profession has unfortunately, but predictably, taken on the value system of society in general and of those who regulate it. Social forces do not currently allow for ethical conduct within the realm of pain management. As a result, the professional conduct of individual physicians and the behavior of the institution of medicine as a whole are neither ethical nor humane. The following explanation will clarify why this is so.

The underlying problem is that no bright line exists between what is legal and what isn’t concerning the prescribing of controlled substances. In fact, many of the expected characteristics of a medical practice where chronic pain is treated effectively are viewed by law enforcement as red flags indicating criminality. This conundrum is best understood through an examination of what transpires as the criminal-justice system targets, investigates, and prosecutes a physician suspected of abusing his prescribing privileges, a physician who becomes in the minds of law-enforcement officials nothing more than a drug pusher in a white coat.

Every prosecution begins with a targeting phase. Something must occur to cause law enforcement to scrutinize a particular physician in the first place. Law enforcement regards pharmacists as their eyes and ears in the community for the purpose of assisting in targeting drug-dealing doctors. As a result, a complaint from a pharmacist who suspects a physician is prescribing too much medication, or is doing so for the wrong people, is commonly the triggering event. Typically, the pharmacist believes, as do his counterparts in law enforcement, that outrageous quantities of dangerous addictive medications are being prescribed to drug addicts posing as pain patients. These patients are assumed to have become drug addicts as a result of the accused physician’s criminal prescribing habits.

Such concerns belong to a category of evidence recognized as red flags. Just as physicians are trained to recognize “aberrant” drug-related behaviors, police and pharmacists learn, while attending educational conferences, to recognize red flags. These are the basis of a system of standards developed by law enforcement to identify illegal prescribing.

Having not been validated in any systematic manner, these red-flag standards are not included within the realm of medical science. In fact, many red flags actually describe the characteristics one would expect to be associated with medical practices where chronic pain is effectively treated. This is precisely why there exists no bright line between drug dealing and legitimate medical prescribing. In fact there is no line at all. Any such line that might have existed was unavoidably crossed when the Controlled Substances Act effectively assigned law enforcement, a nonmedical institution, to regulate the practice of pain management. This fundamental error in social policy is the very root of the pain crisis.

The following serve as examples of the problem.

The biggest red flag is high-volume opioid prescribing. Common sense dictates that significant volumes of opioids are necessary to treat chronic pain effectively. In the context of drug-war ideology, this necessary medical practice resembles drug dealing. When substantial amounts of drugs and money change hands, what else is a cop to think? This is why, when law enforcement regulates pain management, a head-on collision between necessary medical practices and the war on drugs inevitably occurs.

The appearance of poverty is another red flag. All it takes for a doctor to be targeted is a pharmacist who becomes uneasy with the looks of a patient and responds by lodging a complaint. Then the game is on. Police respond by conducting surveillance. Patients with a shabby appearance are observed and are assumed to be drug addicts intent on scoring a fix. Here, again, the drug war collides with medical reality. Chronic pain is a disease, which predictably reduces its victims to poverty and a poor appearance. It accomplishes this by limiting or removing the ability to engage in gainful employment or even to care for oneself properly. As a result, patients suffering from this disease often just don’t look good. Physicians are arrested over this sort of “evidence.”

Another red flag is a dosage of medication out of line with what a pharmacist or law-enforcement official believes the patient should require. This red flag conflicts with medical reality. A fundamental principle underlying the treatment of chronic pain is the individualization of treatment. There exists an enormous range within which appropriate opioid dosages may vary from one patient to the next. The correct amount of medication is whatever works to return a patient to functionality, not the amount some cop or prosecutor thinks it should take.

The Sting Operation and the Myth of Legitimate Prosecution

Rational people assume that if accusations of drug dealing go to trial, the government will be obligated to produce convincing evidence to prove that the physician stepped across a clearly defined line into the realm of criminal misconduct. We assume that unless the physician has done something like prescribing drugs to an undercover agent who asks for them but gives no medical reason, he will be left undisturbed. Our assumptions are mistaken.

The following testimony from a preliminary hearing in my own case, in which all charges, including even murder, were eventually dismissed, illustrates this point (see sidebar):

Mr. Hallinan: [Y]ou were told that numerous agents were sent into Dr. Fisher’s office to try to con him into giving them narcotics without any medical reason; right?
Agent Weatherford: I believe that’s the reason.
Q: And none of them got them; did they?
A: I don’t believe so.

Regardless of how the sting operation turns out, physicians suspected of drug dealing are routinely prosecuted. After the targeting process, which is based on red flags, is completed, the presumption of guilt is apparently so firmly established in the minds of law-enforcement officials that evidence to the contrary is overlooked. The physician’s fate is all but sealed. It is difficult to imagine the rationale employed by law enforcement in prosecuting a case under these circumstances, but it is known from bitter experience how they go about it.

After the sting operation fails to produce evidence of illegal prescribing, instead of re-evaluating the legitimacy of their case, prosecutors intent on obtaining a conviction go to plan B. They have failed to prove that the targeted physician’s behavior was illegal, so it becomes necessary to prove that, while maintaining the appearance of the practice of medicine, the accused physician actually intended to deal drugs. To this end, a “records case” is constructed.

To generate evidence of criminal intent, “experts” in the fields of pain management and addiction medicine are hired to review the accused physician’s medical records. These “experts” then take the witness stand and deliver what amount to sermons regarding the dangerous, addictive, and even lethal qualities of opioid analgesics. Typically, they refer to these substances as narcotics. This language inflames the pre-existing biases of jurors, who are usually unfamiliar with the science pertaining to these beneficial substances. The “experts” then proceed to offer a litany of examples purporting to show that, in their opinion, the accused doctor deviated from acceptable medical practice. If what the accused physician had done was clearly not medicine, there would be no need for expert testimony. This “evidence,” based on an interpretation of the standard of care, is presented as if it had something to do with drug dealing. The resulting legal affairs are best characterized as morality plays.

The role of academic physicians in the pain crisis is particularly troubling. They have turned away, as a group, from their ethical obligations to control pain. Instead, they teach the aforementioned system of “aberrant” drug-related behaviors, ensconcing them into textbooks and professional journal articles. Academics also turn with regularity against their colleagues who have attempted in good faith to treat chronic pain. By doing so, they increase both their professional standing and their personal wealth.

Witch-Hunts

To understand the pain crisis, it is useful to know a little bit about the history and general characteristics of witch-hunts. A look into the situation that developed in Salem, Massachusetts, during the late 1600s is instructive. It exposes two outstanding features that pertain to witch-hunts in general. The first is that anyone can be targeted and the triggers are social. The second is that the evidence employed to get convictions, when examined rationally, is tenuous. A category of evidence known as spectral evidence was employed in Salem. This consisted of the supposed victim’s accusing the suspected witch of appearing before her in a dream.

The circumstantial evidence of criminal intent provided by government witnesses is the modern-day equivalent of spectral evidence.

Long before the witch trial of an accused physician begins, he is burned at the stake in the media. He is portrayed as a greedy Dr. Feelgood who represents a menace to society. The following are among the remarks that may appear in the local newspaper concerning the accused physician and his practice: “We are shutting down suppliers of a highly addictive drug that has been improperly allowed to saturate the community.” “I think he’ll turn out just like Kevorkian. These are highly toxic drugs. We’re not even allowed to flush them down the toilet, for fear we’ll contaminate the drinking water.”

Prosecuting pain-treating physicians as drug dealers relies on the myth that there are bad doctors eager to prostitute their medical licenses. This myth is driven by media hysteria around opioids because stories about drug panics sell newspapers. As a group, physicians avoid risk whenever possible. It is unlikely that physicians who commit a dozen years of their lives to achieving an educational and professional status that guarantees them a generous living would choose to risk it all by dealing drugs. That is why pain is under-treated in the first place. The risks associated even with necessary prescribing are deemed unacceptable by the vast majority of physicians.

It is generally understood that people get the government they deserve. It also appears that because medical practices reflect social values, we also get the medicine we deserve. It is therefore incumbent on society to transform its core value of drug control to one that gives pain control priority. This will undoubtedly occur as people become aware of the implications of the medical and human-rights disaster that currently passes itself off as the management of chronic pain.

“The Property Basis of Rights,” September 1980

There has been an attempt to separate property rights from other rights in this century. It has usually been done by labeling some rights as “human rights” and referring to others as “rights” of property. This distinction has been accompanied by the claim that “human rights” are superior to “property rights.”

. . . The distinction has not gone unchallenged. In the 1960s there was even a sort of slogan coined which called it into question. It went something like this: “Property rights are human rights.” The idea had some appeal. After all, rights are not something ordinarily thought of as belonging to plants or the lower animals. If there is a right to property, it must be first and foremost a human right. That was not, of course, quite the distinction the critics of property rights were attempting to make. They referred to property rights as if they were rights belonging to property. Those who challenged this concept maintained, to the contrary, that property rights were really rights of human beings to property. Thus, “Property rights are human rights.”

At the time, I agreed with this line of reasoning—I still do—and thought it stated the case adequately. However, further study and reflection have led me to a somewhat different conclusion. Property rights are not just another human right; such a statement understates the case. They are much more fundamental than that. Property rights are basic to all rights.

This relationship first occurred to me while studying the loss of rights in totalitarian countries. My general conclusion was that the loss of property rights either preceded or accompanied the loss of other rights. This was so in Hitler’s Germany. It was so in Lenin’s and Stalin’s Russia. It has also been the case in other totalitarian countries. It is possible that some property rights could be retained while other rights, such as freedom of speech, freedom of press, freedom of religion, freedom of association and so on, would be severely curtailed or taken away. But it is now inconceivable to me that other rights could be maintained when property rights were gone.

This suggests to me that there is a causal connection between property and other rights. The historical connection can be seen not only in countries where rights have been lost but also in countries where they were being established. For example, in England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, real property was being made private and personal. At the same time, there was a movement for substantial freedom of religion. In the wake of the establishment of these came the protection of other rights. . . .

Conceptually, all rights are either elaborations or extensions of property rights. For example, in the United States a person has the right to order the disposition of his bodily remains after death, by will. The right to one’s body is an elaboration of property rights; indeed, it may be the most basic property right. A will is written to dispose of one’s property. Hence, the right to order by will what disposition shall be made of the body is an extension of the process.

Many rights are so closely tied to property rights that they are virtually indistinguishable from them. For example, the right to buy and sell or, more broadly, to trade freely, is a property right. It is an aspect of the ownership of property. Free speech and a free press are fundamentally property rights. . . .

There is probably no way of conceiving of individual rights other than as either property rights or extensions of property rights. . . .

All attempts to exorcise property from rights and privileges, then, are in vain. Any claim to a right or privilege is, in some sense, a claim to property. It is possible, of course, to downgrade private property. But in the process, individual rights are unavoidably undercut.

“Health Care: Cross Questions and Crooked Answers,” May 1980

At the sometimes innocent parties I went to when I was an adolescent we occasionally played a game called “Cross Questions and Crooked Answers.” Boys were lined up on one side and girls on the other. Each boy was handed a slip of paper on which a question was written. Each girl got one with an answer. When they had been written, each question had an appropriate answer to it. But they were passed out randomly so that, hopefully, the questions no longer matched the answers when they were read. If all went well, there would be a series of malaprops, inanities, and ribaldries.

A variation of Cross Questions and Crooked Answers has now achieved adult status. Political involvement in medicine has made it commonplace without our being aware of it. Let us take a statement first. It is usually worded something like this: “Every American should have quality medical care.” Now, the question, “Don’t you want the best quality medical care possible?” It is tempting to treat this as a straight question, and to make what appears to be the only reasonable answer. Namely, “Of course, I want the best quality medical care possible.” From that point on the discussion degenerates into a debate as to which is the best possible system for providing quality medical care. It may not be a futile debate, but it is apt to be inconclusive because the best points have been conceded by the answer given to the question.

This is so because “Don’t you want the best medical care possible?” is a Cross Question. It is a Cross Question which will most likely elicit a Crooked Answer. Indeed, it is what one of my professors in graduate school called a false question. A false question is one which can only be answered by giving an answer that will be in some part wrong, regardless of what angle you take on it.

To illustrate, let me give the opposite answer to the question, a somewhat perverse answer, if you like. “No, I do not want the best possible medical care. In fact, I do not want medical care at all. Medical care is not something one drools over, like a steak, the best cut of which everyone should have. I do not long for the ministrations of physicians or for the comforts of a hospital bed. Indeed, my preferences run in the opposite direction, to have as little truck with any of these as possible.”

The answer is evasive, of course, but it is evasion with a point. I want the question reworded. The first order of business is not the quality of medical care; medical care is only a means, not an end. The quality of life is my main concern, not the quality of medical care. The question might be rephrased this way: What do you want from life to which medical care (and its quality presumably) is directly related? Now that is a straight question which can be given a straight answer.

My answer would go something like this. I want the use of my faculties with as little impairment as possible. I want to see, hear, smell, feel, walk, taste, talk, and use my limbs well so that I can function normally. Why? So that I can look after myself. So that I can manage my own affairs. So that I can be independent in order to fulfill my purpose as a man. In short, my concern with medical care is as an adjunct to my personal independence.

Contemporary medical practice has this as its primary aim. Its aim is to maintain or restore the independence of the individual, to get him up and walking again, to get him to looking after his bodily needs, to get him to exercising his faculties, and so on. The desired goal is dismissal of the patient and a minimal dependence on drugs. In short, good medical practice requires that the patient be restored to independent status as quickly as in the judgment of the attending physician he is ready for it.

Medical care cannot correctly be considered in a vacuum. When we do so we can only ask Cross Questions and get Crooked Answers about it. It is part of the larger corpus of life itself, and ordinarily a subordinate part. In the context of the statements made above, the aim of medical care—the maintaining and restoring of personal independence—is part of the broader aim of personal independence for individuals. Whatever impairs the independence of the individual will tend to be detrimental to the aims of medicine. . . .

“Farming Is a Business,” August 1986

The plight of service station operators does not appear to ever have caught the public fancy. Not once in all my years as a diligent TV watcher can I recall having seen a special on the subject, or even a segment on the evening news about the disappearance of the family-operated service station. The television cameras have not focused on any sheriff’s bankruptcy sale of some service stations, with the sheriff surrounded by a bunch of surly service station operators protesting the sale. No legislatures or courts have declared a moratorium on foreclosures on service stations, to my knowledge. There are no Federal Service Station Banks to provide easy credit to go into the service station business. And, in all my years of perusing textbooks on American history, I have never encountered even a sentence about “The Service Station Problem,” much less a paragraph or a whole section of a chapter.

By contrast—and what makes the above so remarkable—I have seen reams of material over the years dealing with “The Farm Problem.” No presidential administration since that of Rutherford B. Hayes, at the latest, has managed to get by without some sort of “Farm Crisis.” Every sort of scheme, crackpot or otherwise, to deal with the farm problem has had its advocates, and many a bill has made its way through state legislatures and Congress that was supposed to address the problems of farmers. For more than a hundred years now those who claimed to speak for farmers have proclaimed the responsibility of government to help farmers, and for nearly as long governments have been passing legislation of one sort or another that was supposed to do just that. Inflation—back in the days when everyone understood that meant an increase in the money supply—was once considered to be the panacea for farm problems. Then it was regulation of rail rates, government-sponsored loan programs to provide easy credit, government-sponsored cooperative storage and crop loan facilities, parity payments, subsidies, and so on. No history book worthy of the name is minus sections planted here and there through the accounts of the last hundred years detailing the plight of the farmers. And, according to spokesmen for farmers, the problem is apparently as urgent today as ever, what with declining foreign markets, drops in the prices of farm lands, and widespread farm foreclosures.

It is not my point, of course, that farmers have not had and do not have problems. As far back as my information goes, farmers have always had problems of one sort or another. They have ever been hampered in their enterprise by droughts, floods, plagues, disease, fat years when prices fell and lean years when prices might rise but they produced much less. Farmers have been going into debt ever since merchants, factors, or bankers could be found to extend credit, many of them going deeper in debt from year to year in the vain hope that bumper crops could be sold at high prices to rescue them. Anyone who doubts this should study the accounts of American farmers and planters in our own colonial history. There have been many changes in technology and farming methods over the years, but the sort of financial problems encountered by commercial farmers have not changed much.

My point, rather, is that it is not all that clear that farmers differ that much in having problems from the rest of us who are exposed to the exigencies of the market—which is to say all of us, to greater or lesser extent. Even government workers sometimes lose their jobs, and politicians do not always get re-elected. But I started out to contrast farmers with service station operators, so allow me to stick with that for a bit. The woes of service stations over the years must often have been as great as those of farmers. True, many have left farming for other fields, especially over the past fifty years. But the number of service stations that have gone out of business during the same period must be very large, in view of the many abandoned businesses which dot the countryside. Service stations that remain in business also change hands or come under new management from time to time. One of the plaints about farming is that the family farm is disappearing, but service stations may also be operated by families. Whether service station operators are as prone to bankruptcy as farmers, I have no information, but undoubtedly many service station operators do not make a go of the business for one reason or another.

The central point I wish to make, however, is that farming is a business. In this crucial respect, it is like a host of other businesses. It has been contrasted with operating a service station not because farming is essentially different but because a great deal of political attention and a large number of political programs have been enacted that were supposed to aid farmers. By contrast, very little notice has been paid to service stations, and except for an occasional piece of legislation dealing with the treatment of independents by suppliers, service stations have rarely been singled out except for restrictive legislation. There are many other businesses for which there are no specific government aid programs: toymakers, for example, candy manufacturers, makers of cereals, and so on. Some businesses have been the objects of government programs which were supposed to aid them, of course, but none so massively, I think, nor over so long a period of time. Certainly businesses, in general, have not usually enjoyed public sympathy in this century; they have much more often been the subject of punitive regulation. Moreover, public opposition to and criticism of aiding other businesses has usually been vigorous.

Thus, it is important to emphasize that farming is a business. This is important for two reasons. First, it brings it into the correct framework for considering the appropriateness of providing aid. Second, it helps to cut away the alleged differences from other businesses. . . . This is not to deny that there are public benefits from farming, but these do not appear to differ from those that attend hundreds of other enterprises. . . .

Note that the guarantee is in the form of a restriction on what government may do. The political philosophy of the authors of the Constitution and its Bill of Rights was that all individuals have fundamental human rights against which government is forbidden to trespass. Indeed, the most important function of any just government is to protect those rights for all individuals under its jurisdiction.

Logically, a fundamental human right is one that every individual possesses and can exercise in exactly the same sense at every point. If person A claims a right that, when exercised, denies exactly the same right to person B, the alleged right belongs only to A, not B. It should be called an A right, not a human right, for A and B are rivals in the exercise of the right. Genuine human rights are those which can be held and exercised nonrivalrously. The word “peaceably” in the Amendment has two meanings. The associations we choose to enter may not undertake violence to accomplish their ends, and within each association one person may not coerce another. Associations must be based on mutual consent.

That the Constitution guarantees freedom of association to each of us does not mean that we may each associate with anyone we choose. It means that we may associate with whoever also agrees to associate with us. If B is forced to accept A’s offer of association, B is not free to choose his associations. Association would be a right of A, not B. It would not be a human right. Therefore, freedom of association, correctly understood, has both a positive and a negative component. We are free to associate with those who will accept us (positive), and we are free to abstain from associations of which we do not approve (negative).

The positive right of freedom of association is recognized by the United Nations and by the European Community. Article 20 of the U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) states:

1. Everyone has the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association.
2. No one may be compelled to belong to an association.

Article 11 of the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (1950) states, “Everyone has the right to freedom of association with others, including the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his interest.” Here, unlike in the U.N. Declaration, there is no explicit recognition of the correlative right to refrain from association. However, the European Court of Human Rights read Article 11 as implying a negative freedom of association in Young, James and Webster v. United Kingdom in 1981, a case that involved mandatory union membership imposed on employees of British Rail. The same Court made a similar ruling in a 1994 case, Sigurjonsson v. Iceland, which involved forced membership in an organization of taxi drivers. Negative freedom of association is recognized by American courts for some purposes, but not for all. Most notably, it is not recognized in the case of labor unions.

Freedom of association is often misused as a fundamental argument in support of the legal empowerment of labor unions by the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA). Actually the NLRA violates individual workers’ and individual employers’ freedom of association. It also violates the freedom of association of unions. The authors of the U.S. Constitution would have considered the NLRA unconstitutional on its face. The NLRA was accepted as constitutional by the Supreme Court in the Jones & Laughlin Steel Co. case in 1937 for purely political reasons, not on grounds of careful constitutional reasoning. The New Deal Court sacrificed freedom of association on the altar of political expediency.

Double Violation of Rights

The NLRA violates individual workers’ freedom of association in two ways: forced representation and forced payment of agency fees. First, under the principle of exclusive (monopoly) representation, when a union has been approved as bargaining agent by a majority of workers on a job, that union also becomes the bargaining agent for those workers who voted against the union, as well as for those workers who didn’t vote. Individual members are even forbidden to represent themselves. Other freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment, such as freedom of religion and freedom of speech, are not subject to majority rule. Neither should freedom of association be subject to majority rule.

Second, not content to force numerical minorities to give up their individual right to freedom of association to numerical majorities through exclusive representation, the NLRA also forces many workers who are represented by unions against their will to pay those unions for the representation they do not want. This is called “union security,” but it is forced association. No worker’s fundamental human rights should be sacrificed simply to provide unions with financial security.

The NLRA also violates employers’ freedom of association. It forces employers to recognize and bargain with unions that have been approved by majority votes. Bargaining, after all, is a very close form of association. In ordinary contract law and on the basis of freedom of association, any contract between A and B that is the result of either A or B being forced to bargain with the other is null and void. The NLRA casts aside freedom of association when it forces parties to bargain with each other.

Unions also lose their freedom of association because they are forced to bargain with employers. Under the principle of mandatory good-faith bargaining, if either the union or the employer wants to bargain about an issue, the other side must agree to participate. Unions, of course, don’t count this as a loss. They rely on forced association to accomplish their ends. The NLRA violates the unions’ freedom of association in yet another way. Unions must accept as members any workers who want to join them.

What sort of unionism is consistent with every individual’s freedom of association? In a word, voluntary unionism. Each worker would be free to choose which, if any, union from which he wished to obtain representation services.

Each union would be free to choose which of these willing workers it agreed to represent. It would represent its voluntary members and no one else.

No employer would be compelled to bargain with any union, and no union would be compelled to bargain with any employer. If a worker chose to be represented by a union that was willing to accept that association, any employer who wanted to bargain for the employee’s services would have to bargain with the union chosen by the worker. But any employer would be free to decline to bargain for the services of any worker whether represented by a union or not. Individual employers could choose to settle the question of union representation by majority vote of its employees. Workers who were willing to go along with that process would accept employment with that employer, and other workers would not. Any employer would be free to decide to hire only union-free labor or only unionized labor. Workers who were amenable to that arrangement would accept such employment offers, and other workers would not.

To unions that have grown accustomed to the special privileges granted to them by the NLRA, truly voluntary unionism is anathema. They probably are convinced they cannot survive without the power to coerce others. But if they were forced to rely on the consent of others they might become quite innovative and actually put together packages of services that workers and employers would find genuinely useful. In any event, the welfare of unions is not a legitimate excuse for violating the freedom of association of anyone.

If Congress insists on giving unions special privileges of coercion, it should be honest and promulgate a constitutional amendment that says freedom of association does not apply in labor markets. Don’t hold your breath.

What exactly constitute “economic human rights”? The KWRU website points to Articles 23, 25, and 26 of the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights in support of “the rights due every human being.” They include food, clothing, housing, medical care, “necessary social services,” education, work, favorable conditions of work, “just and favorable remuneration,” and the like. Naturally, no one at the organization bothers to justify the grounds on which “every human being” possesses these “rights” other than by this argument from authority.

The closest the site comes to an “argument” is the assertion that the people for whom the organization speaks want things, and some other people have lots of things, so these latter people should be required to give up some of them. Never raised is the question of whether these people with lots of things acquired them honestly or, if so, on what precise grounds the KWRU is justified in demanding that these goods be violently seized from peaceful and honest people.

That so-called “welfare rights” are philosophically fraudulent can be demonstrated by imagining everyone exercising them simultaneously. Surely a right that belongs to human beings qua human beings, such as life itself, ought to be able to be exercised without difficulty by every human being at the same time. If everyone demanded the same welfare right at the same time, no one would get anything, as everyone simultaneously attempted to coerce everyone else.

The libertarian philosopher Frank van Dun recently offered a helpful example. Imagine two people on a desert island: “One can imagine what will happen if they sit there insisting on their ‘right’ of being employed by the other at a just and favorable wage, or to receive unemployment compensation high enough to allow them an existence worthy of their dignity. One can also imagine what will happen if, instead of just sitting there, they attempt to enforce their human rights against one another: their own version of Hobbes’ war of all against all.”1

It is also completely senseless to claim that human beings possess “rights” to goods that in some times and places were not available at all or could be acquired only with the most strenuous toil. Rights obviously cannot be universal or natural to man if they cannot be exercised in all times and places—the very definition of universal.

If in some cases the less fortunate may have a moral claim on the generosity of their fellows, this is a far cry from staking a legal claim to the fruits of someone else’s labor. Forcibly confiscating the justly earned goods of someone you have never met and who has done you no wrong really does require some kind of philosophical justification beyond simply, “We want free stuff!”

This is especially true when we recall the true nature of poverty in the United States. By any conceivable standard, the “poor” in America enjoy a standard of living that people in previous ages (and indeed elsewhere in the world today) could scarcely have imagined. Some 41 percent of our “poor” own their own homes, with another 75 percent owning automobiles and VCRs, and two-thirds having air conditioning and microwave ovens. Virtually all own telephones, refrigerators, and television sets, all of which were once considered luxuries. The average poor person in America has more living space and is more likely to own a car and a dishwasher than the average European. Recalling that we live in a society in which among the poor obesity is a greater problem than malnourishment further helps to put the alleged poverty problem here into perspective. 2

Job Training

It is almost charming that the KWRU can seriously propose increased spending and a federal commitment to job training as the solution to “poverty” without so much as hinting at the $5.4 trillion dollars spent on various federal, state, and local welfare programs since 1965 or the more than 60 different federal job-training programs that currently exist for welfare recipients. 3

And no wonder the activists would rather make placards demanding job training than actually discuss the programs that already exist: federal job training has been one of the most notoriously wasteful government boondoggles of the past 35 years. Consider the Job Corps, a well-known vocational training program for the unemployed that began in 1965. Early on, studies found that those who completed the program had no better success in the job market than so-called “no shows” (people who had been accepted into the Job Corps but who had never shown up), despite the fact that the program cost about the same as providing a Harvard education for every participant. Worse still, throughout the program’s first decade two-thirds of participants never even finished. 4 Is it a hate crime to suggest that perhaps we have happened upon one of the reasons they have had such difficulty finding work?

We might also recall the Boston Compact, a much smaller program in the early 1990s in which private employers guaranteed a job to anyone who graduated from high school. The dropout rate actually rose after the Compact was announced. 5 Such examples could be multiplied ad infinitum.

In many cases, perfectly respectable jobs that require only the most basic skills are easily available, but applicants lack even these. Unless agitators for “economic human rights” are prepared to argue that the poor are complete imbeciles who cannot even be expected to learn basic math, these unsuccessful job seekers can hardly be held blameless for their situation. According to Myron Magnet, the “higher skills” that a steel mill near Chicago recently needed but could not find “amounted to little more than being able to divide 100 by four and, going one step further, to understand the concept of 75 percent.” Moreover, it generally takes “only basic math for a worker to handle the statistical process control that is one of the key recent technological advances in manufacturing.”

Magnet continues: “One didn’t think of secretarial skills as being particularly elevated until recently, when corporations in big cities found that increasing numbers of applicants lacked them. Now anxious companies pay their employees bounties for bringing in qualified applicants for secretarial jobs. Anyone who wants her children . . . to escape poverty needs only to make sure they learn basic literacy, computer typing, and polite, businesslike demeanor in high school.” 6

Can that really be too much to ask?

Staying Out of Poverty

A grand total of 3 percent of married couples who have a high school education are poor. 7 Just complete high school and get married, and you have a 97 percent chance of not being poor. (The Economist reported in 1988 that an American had a less than 1 percent chance of being poor if he simply completed high school, got and stayed married, and held a job, even a minimum-wage job, for at least a year. 8)

To be sure, we’re probably violating the “rights” of the clients of the Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign by demanding anything of them; the logic of their position requires them to believe that for doing nothing at all they are entitled to food, clothing, a home, an education, comprehensive health care, and perhaps 77 other things. Still, sensible people probably don’t consider marriage and a high school education to be insuperable hurdles or a society that demands them akin to Nazi Germany. 9

The fact that a few people own yachts is not a cause of the condition of the poor, nor is it just cause for resentment. But it isn’t difficult to find things that do worsen the condition of the poor. For one thing, the various job benefits that the economic human rights advocates demand naturally make it more expensive and less desirable to hire people in the first place, and therefore create more unemployment. This is one reason that some companies have simply left the United States altogether, all too happy to leave the yelping “social justice” advocates behind. For its part, the Federal Reserve system has consistently and drastically undermined the value of the currency we use, a fact that is likely to be felt more acutely by those with less money.

The suffocating effects of federal regulation also reduce our standard of living. The 1994 Code of Federal Regulations, which lists all federal regulations currently in effect, comprised some 201 books, taking up an incredible 26 feet of shelf space. Its index alone numbers 754 pages. 10 This makes business more costly and all of us less wealthy; some businesses never get started at all because they cannot survive the regulatory regime that has been fastened on us. Social Security confiscates wealth in exchange for a pitiful return (and indeed very likely for no return at all given the way the program is going). In what way can one suggest even jokingly that such a program does anything but defraud the poor, taking money from them that they need in the present in exchange for some indeterminate but certainly minuscule return in the future?

As libertarians well know, the only way to bring about permanent increases in wages across the board is to create a business climate in which capital investment is as unhampered as possible. Increasing the amount of capital equipment at workers’ disposal increases labor productivity and hence wages. With a forklift, a worker may well be able to move enough pallets to earn $25 per hour; without it he’d be lucky to get $8. If someone’s labor is worth only $8 per hour, all the screeching, protesting, and labor organizing in the world won’t get him $25 per hour.

Advocates of economic human rights would doubtless be at a loss to explain why, when unionism was numerically negligible and federal regulation all but nonexistent, real wages in manufacturing climbed an incredible 50 percent in the United States from 1860 to 1890, and 37 percent more from 1890 to 1914, or why American workers were so much better off than their much more heavily unionized counterparts in Europe. 11 It is probably safe to say that few if any of these advocates are even aware of this fact, and probably somewhere around zero ever make mention of it.

It’s time such people learned that stomping one’s feet, shouting demands, and grabbing other people’s things isn’t really how wealth is created, or an especially dignified way for grown men and women to behave.

Notes

1. Frank van Dun, “Human Dignity: Reason or Desire? Natural Rights versus Human Rights,” Journal of Libertarian Studies, Fall 2001, p. 10.
2. For a proper perspective on rich and poor in the United States, see W. Michael Cox and Richard Alm, Myths of Rich and Poor: Why We’re Better Off Than We Think (New York: Basic Books, 2000).
3. The $5.4 trillion figure covers only through 1995 and is cited in Michael Tanner, The End of Welfare: Fighting Poverty in the Civil Society (Washington, D.C.: Cato Institute, 1996), p. 69.
4. Allen J. Matusow, The Unraveling of America: A History of Liberalism in the 1960s (New York: Harper & Row, 1984), pp. 237–39.
5. Jared Taylor, Paved with Good Intentions: The Failure of Race Relations in Contemporary America (New York: Carroll & Graf, 1992), p. 292.
6. Myron Magnet, The Dream and the Nightmare: The Sixties’ Legacy to the Underclass (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2000 [1993]), pp. 48–49.
7. Linda J. Waite and Maggie Gallagher, The Case for Marriage (New York: Doubleday, 2000), p. 122.
8. “Politics Without Economics,” The Economist, August 6, 1988, p. 8.
9. U.S. Rep. John Lewis once claimed that those who would cut welfare payments are like Nazis. See L. Brent Bozell III, “The Obvious Politics of the Gaffe Patrol,” April 13, 1995, www.mediaresearch.org/columns/news/col19950413.html.
10. . Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Democracy: The God that Failed (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 2001), p. 62.
11. 11. George Brown Tindall and David Emory Shi, America: A Narrative History, vol. II, brief 5th ed. (New York: W.W. Norton, 2000), p. 692.

Thomas E. Woods Jr. holds a Ph.D. in history from Columbia University and is assistant professor of history at Suffolk Community College (SUNY) in Brentwood, New York.

After just three months, the Taliban was overthrown, the al Qaeda network was disrupted, and Osama bin Laden was dead or had escaped. There wasn’t much more work to do in Afghanistan, so long as the Bush administration did not take on the thankless task of attempting to build a Western-style democracy in Afghanistan. But with al Qaeda operatives active in an estimated 40 countries, a lot of other potential targets beckon. U.S. Representative Todd Tiahrt points to the Philippines: “After Afghanistan, this is the next priority because there are Americans at risk.”

However, intervention in the Philippines risks sucking the United States into conflicts that affect America only tangentially, if that. The archipelagic nation has long faced an insurgency among its minority Muslim population. The conflict waxes and wanes, seemingly insoluble but never threatening the Philippine stability, let alone American security. Commanding most recent attention is the Abu Sayyaf gang, which seized three Americans last year. In November Lt. Commander Jeff Davis, spokesman for the Pentagon’s Pacific Command, claimed that Abu Sayyaf was “an international terrorist group that poses as much of a threat to the U.S. as to the Philippines.”

The Bush administration subsequently announced $92 million in military aid, rushed in nearly 700 military advisers, and offered combat troops. Manila eagerly accepted the cash and advice. And although it rejected the troops—the Philippine constitution prohibits operations by foreign forces—the Americans will be armed and authorized to defend themselves. Moreover, constitutional objections in a country where the previous president was ousted last year in a soft coup, after the military withdrew its support, might eventually fade.

There is, however, no national security justification for American involvement. Abu Sayyaf’s ties to al Qaeda are peripheral at best. Its now-deceased leader fought in Afghanistan against the Soviets; bin Laden’s brother-in-law, Mohammad Jamal Khalifa, seems to have channeled some money to Abu Sayyaf.

However, the group operates more like bandits than terrorists. Although they have routinely demanded the release of Ramzi Yousef, mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center attack, they have been satisfied with bountiful ransoms—collecting about $20 million in 2000, which they used to stoke their arsenal and attract recruits.

Abu Sayyaf has shown no interest in conducting a serious campaign against the United States. Rather, its American victims have been targets of opportunity, visiting the wrong resort at the wrong time. It’s awful when it happens, but it’s not unusual in what remains a dangerous world.

Nor is there any reason the Philippines should be unable to bring the bandits to justice. Manila has more than enough troops, and they are better equipped than the guerrillas. By the end of last year as many as 7,000 soldiers were searching for a band thought to have dwindled to the dozens.

Unfortunately, the Philippines has only itself to blame for its failure. In fact, Abu Sayyaf has taunted the United States about how American weapons shipped to Manila regularly end up in its hands. Bribes to military commanders have apparently helped gang members escape from government attacks.

Training, advice, and equipment from America might help. But the Philippines’ economic and political problems run deep. Coup rumors circulated last fall, for instance, and before that the Arroyo administration declared a state of emergency to combat what it claimed was another plot. Until Manila successfully addresses its own failings, it is unlikely to develop the kind of honest and loyal institutions necessary to eliminate groups like Abu Sayyaf.

Out of frustration with Filipino ineffectiveness, Representative Tiahrt, who represents the home district of the captured missionaries, Martin and Gracia Burnham, flew to Manila to urge President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo to accept the intervention of U.S. troops. Victorino Matus of the Weekly Standard says simply: “send in U.S. Special Forces.”

Yet the reason for such intervention has nothing to do with American security. Writes Matus: “it is—or should be—absolutely imperative for the United States to do whatever it takes to free its own people.” Tiahrt sounds the same trumpet: “if it were for me, and I’m sure if it were for you, as an American, you’d hope America would come to your rescue.” But U.S. foreign policy should not be driven by the activism of one particularly dedicated congressman. So Tiahrt is calling for development of a consistent American strategy of intervention.

But general human rights cases are problematic. When President Bush presented his ultimatum to the Taliban government last fall, he demanded not only the surrender of bin Laden but also the release of two American Christians charged with proselytizing. Diplomatic and public pressure to gain respect for human rights is assuredly a good thing, but not military action to enforce the same.

Intervention is usually least appropriate when the abuses are committed by unofficial groups. The right strategy is to leave the resolution of most hostage crises to local governments. Official involvement automatically raises the stakes.

A Way to Draw in Washington

Moreover, military intervention sucks the United States into what are usually broader conflicts ill-suited to easy resolution. Indeed, a consistent policy of rescue provides a trigger by which antagonists can consciously draw in Washington.

Americans, whether busy making money, playing tourist, proselytizing their faith, or doing good works, should not expect to be backed by a Marine Expeditionary Force.

For instance, the Burnhams, missionaries since 1986, are admirable folks. So is Clark Bowers, kidnapped by an Afghan tribal warlord while attempting to deliver medical supplies. But traveling and living abroad carry risks that should be borne by those who choose to accept them.

Of course, standing aloof may seem hard-hearted. But I visited Kosovo in 1998 and eastern Burma in 2000, both engulfed in guerrilla war, and Ambon, Indonesia, in 2001, in which a still-dangerous cold war followed two years of Muslim-Christian violence. I took what I considered to be reasonable risks. Had I miscalculated, however, I did not expect the cavalry to arrive. So far, the war on terrorism has been a dramatic success. But there’s more to be done. Washington needs to keep its focus on combating transnational groups that threaten the American people at home.

America need not take on responsibility for eradicating banditry the world over.

Doug Bandow, a nationally syndicated columnist, is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and the author and editor of several books.