By Wanjiru Njoya
Mises.org
June 27, 2024
Natural-rights libertarians reject
egalitarianism, regarding it as a revolt against nature. On that
premise, the only valid rights are those that give effect to
self-ownership and private property. All rights created to give effect
to egalitarian values are phony rights, and as Lew Rockwell has explained, “phony civil rights put your life in danger.”
Murray Rothbard was against all phony rights, “all ‘rights’ for special groups,” with no exceptions. He explains:
Government has been used to create a
phony set of “rights” for every designated victim group under the sun,
to be used to dominate and exploit the rest of us for the special gain
of these cosseted groups. . . . The malignant New Class grant themselves
and accredited victim groups ever increasing power to exploit,
dominate, and loot an ever-dwindling group of middle-aged, white,
English-speaking, Christian and especially heterosexual male parents.
These rights are constructed within the civil rights framework, which
is convenient for constructing phony rights because civil rights law is
“preapproved” as “our shared values.” Fighting against phony rights
means rejecting the Civil Rights Act, and nobody wants to do that.
They prefer to suppose that the Civil Rights Act has been hijacked to
suit Far Left and communist ideals or that civil rights law is being
“misrepresented,” and if correctly interpreted, its worst excesses will
be avoided. However, the truth is that this legislation is designed to
achieve precisely the goals it is in fact achieving. All these phony
rights are a feature, not a flaw, of this legislation.