Personal, Private, and Public Property
 

Confusion over rights issues arises from delusions accompanied by distortions of reality. Individuals see themselves as citizens, each possessing certain “human rights” flowing from and guaranteed by a government of limited, enumerated powers. They support their government, confident in the idea of popular sovereignty, of a government created by “We the people.” But this unbounded confidence in the possession of their rights contrasts sharply with an inability to identify them and describe their application. Emotion, not logic, characterizes public attention to the subject.

Legal professionals, including many judges, often seem just as bewildered. Their training heavily favored the letter of the law and its procedures, not its philosophical basis.

The fundamentals are simple; their application is not.

Picture life in American as divided into three sectors: the personal sector, the private sector, and the public sector.

Unalienable rights, being inseparable from the individual, are intrinsic to the personal sector, best exemplified by the simple agrarian society of the Amish. Similar in culture to that of the Founding Fathers, the Amish have little use for the social programs of an intrusive government with its social security numbers and income tax forms. If for no other reason than the window they provide into the nation’s history, these people are a national treasure. Regrettably, the seduction of the private sector lures many, particularly the younger members, diminishing their numbers and way of life.
 

The realm of commerce occupies the private sector, by far the largest. Usually, “private” means “business.” When thinking about private rights, substitute the word business or commercial for private and see if the application remains the same. If not, the word personal may be more appropriate.

A private home or private vehicles are private properties held for business reasons. The government has a legitimate interest in these items. They are subject to continuing taxes and regulation. Not so with personal property such as clothes. When you buy shoes at a department store, especially in a taxable transaction, you remove them from commerce as the private property of the store and make them your personal property. The sales tax operates as a severance tax, the transaction cutting the shoes off from the realm of commerce and greatly reducing the government’s interest in them.

Do not waste a lot of time looking for a clear line of distinction between personal (privacy) rights and private (contractual) rights. The boundary between the personal and private sectors is more a merger than a seam. Clearly, some rights are purely and deeply personal: one’s sense of self, personality, intellect, interests, choices of intimate relationships, family, procreation and raising children. As the list progresses, so too does justifiable government concern: marriage, contraception, abortion, child labor, education and occupational choices.

In moving from the personal sector into the private sector, an individual’s private rights and civil privileges tend to supercede their personal rights. On entering the public sector, specifically political life and public office but also as a celebrity, an individual relinquishes even more of their personal and private rights. Investments owned by Presidents of the United States must be held in blind trusts, out of their control and, in theory, out of range of their knowledge. Intimate details of personal lives may become public information. Criticism and ridicule goes with the territory as celebrities, public officials and policies become the subject of late night comedy shows and cartoons. Public personalities endure it all with very little defense and virtually no recourse. For better or worse, a free society has the collective right, in the form of the personal and private rights of its members, to voice its opinions.

How then to view the relationship between the government and “human rights”? Are personal rights, the right to “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness” and others identified in the Bill of Rights, passive in their character, merely forbidding government interference and meddling? Or does the government have an affirmative obligation, as some segments of society (the feminist, civil rights leaders, welfare rights workers, etc.) claim, to promote “human rights?” To borrow Professor Stephen Macedo’s[1] metaphor, is this relationship best described as islands of government authority amidst a sea of individual freedom or islands of individual freedom amidst a sea of government authority?

The answer depends on where you stand. From the personal sector one sees a very limited government, from the public sector, the opposite view. The majority of people in the middle private sector believe it to be the only sector. They stumble blindly into the other sectors, perplexed by the changing rules of lands they never knew existed.
 

1 Stephen Macedo, The New Right v. The Constitution (Washington, D.C.: Cato Institute, 1987), 32 Referenced by Terry Eastland in Benchmarks (William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1995), 96–97