Easy question. The answer is no.
What are rights?
- Rights are inherent in a person. They are not bestowed by any other
person or by the government, they cannot be taken away by any other
person or by the government. (They can, of course, be infringed
through the application of force.)
- They inhere in individuals, not in groups. The
government does not
have rights, nor do your family, your church, or your Little League
team. Obviously this does not say that groups of people cannot agree
to exercise their rights in concert
for the good of the group.
- Vitally important, and mostly ignored these days, is that a right
of one person cannot impose an obligation on another. Keeping this
principle in mind makes answering questions such as this node poses
very easy.
There is no problem saying that each person has a right to work. Equally,
each person has a right not to work — but that right does not and
cannot create an obligation for any other person to support him.
If we say that a person has a right to a job,
what else are we saying?
That some other person has the obligation to employ him, whether he wants
to or not. That is unacceptable.
When you hear these people talk about rights, as you particularly do during
election season, ask yourself: are we really talking about rights?
The fact is, at the same time the politicians and the talking heads are
talking about the "rights" we all have, you don't hear them talking about
the real rights that they're infringing.
- Right to health care?
- No, you have no right to "health care". What you do have is a right
to protect your own health as you wish, but many
such avenues have been made illegal.
- Right to education?
- No, you have no right to be educated. What you do have is a right
to learn, and to contract with others to help you. Except that opting
out of
government schooling
is tricky and expensive.
- Right to a job?
- No, you have no right to a job. What you do have is a right to contract
with another to do work for him in return for remuneration, and a
right to contract with another to do work for you. But those rights
are infringed on all sides by minimum wage laws, labor union laws,
and laws such as affirmative action and the
ADA.
Being a resident of the USA, the laws I refer to are the ones in place there.