Everything is Connected To Everything Else

That was Lenin's acute observation many years ago.  It jumped to mind the other day with this bit from Cheri DiNovo, MPP here in Toronto, and wannabe Grand Inquisitor to Mark Steyn, Ezra Levant and any other "right-wing bigots" standing on a street corner in the Imperial Capital.

Bigots deserve rights
In political life, being misquoted is a fact of life but I suppose the irony of being misquoted in an article on the absolute freedom of speech is doubly ironic (“Speech! Speech! Speech!,” Notebook, Feb. 12). You see I am absolutely in favour of right-wing bigots having freedom of speech. Their opponents deserve the same rights.

What I actually pointed out to your hero Mark Steyn at the hearings is that there is a limit to freedom of speech in a democracy and that is not only when there’s an incitement to violence but when your freedom of speech bumps up against my right to housing, jobs, i.e., my freedom. Hence the libertarians have no answer (and neither did Mark) to why we must curtail someone’s freedom-of-speech rights if they happen to want to say that they don’t hire Jews for example. Hateful speech can lead to hateful action. That is why we have a Charter of Rights and a Human Rights Code and the enforcement of both. 

I hope EYE WEEKLY supports a human rights code and its enforcement. At the very least check Hansard and recognize irony whenyou hear it. CHERI DINOVO MPP, PARKDALE HIGH PARK

Di Novo is Exhbit A in my running argument to my fellow religious infidels that we shouldn't be too worried about the religious right in North America, the religious left is the one calling for resurrecting - pardon the expression - of the Holy Secularized Inquisition of the Human Rights Commissions.  Di Novo's trick here is clever, like her attempt to corner the Steyn on "No Irish Need Apply" in this week's testimony at Queen's Park (see below).  She's all for rights, but your rights end where my rights begin.  Not libertarian or classical liberal on earth could object to that?  Surely not, but DiNovo is usng what Rand once called an anti-concept.  Using a concept which most people associate with a particular position, but applying it in an entirely different way to subvert the original concept.  The classic example was the term "extermism."  It suggested fringe elements of the political spectrum, racists and political and religious fanatics.  When Barry Goldwater was branded an extremist it was an attempt by the Left to lump the AZ Senator with the nutters burning crosses on black lawns in the South.  

The version Di Novo is using has a much more respectable pedigree than the "extremist" smear of two generations ago.  The idea emerged in the late Victorian era that people were entitled to more than their traditional rights as British subjects (or American citizens) - the kind noted by John Locke and Algernon Sydney.  These old fashioned rights were termed "negative rights."  It was what government refrained from doing to you. The "negative" also put the concept in an obvious bad light.  The newfangled rights were called, leap of the imagination, "positive rights."  These were what government did for you, not refrained from doing.  So we're still talking about rights, just a different kind of rights.  Don't worry we're all about freedom still. The most famous example to date of this conflation comes from FDR - who is now sadly back en vogue - in his Four Freedoms:  Freedom of speech and expression, Freedom of religion, Freedom from want and Freedom from fear.  

Now three of those rights are valid, old fashioned "negative rights," though vaguely expressed.  Freedom from want has been smuggled in their as a "positive right."  The problem is that so called "positive rights" deny other people's "negative rights."  Freedom from want, or a right to housing and a job as Di Novo asserts, have to be paid for by someone.  Since the state does not create wealth, merely re-distributes it, someone's traditional right to their property and, as we've seen with the historical arc of the Human Rights Commissions, their right to free speech is curtailed.  Di Novo has taken a classical liberal argument - your rights go no further than my nose - to subvert classical liberalism.  Just as socialism aimed to replace one form of serfdom with another, so the modern Left seeks to replace the old inquisition with a new one. It isn't that anyone is preparing the iron maiden for a comeback, they don't have to.  The modern state is pervasive enough that it can deny you a job and your freedoms with nary a blade being sharpened.

The Gods of the Copybook Headings