Does every right come at somebody else's expense?
In the comments on , Rhodes math professor makes a very important point. I quote him in full:
Of course, it is a fallacy that every right comes with a meaningful cost derived at somebody else鈥檚 expense. For years, I鈥檝e heard that respecting the right of every person to marry the one they love will 鈥渃ost鈥� heterosexuals something. It will do something to their children. It will impose some utterly vague inconvenience on straights as they come to understand marriage differently. It will force the state to shed pennies here and there to allow LGBT individuals to enjoy the same estate tax, Social Security, etc., benefits. While this 鈥渞ight鈥� comes with a cost (and the general point about NFLVR is well-taken), let鈥檚 be clear about the real reasons that people complain about certain costs: these complaints are often a thinly-veiled way to encode bigotry or disdain for a group of people, whether those people are a pair of lesbians living in the hood or a family in sub-Saharan Africa hoping for a clean water source.
A couple of thoughts in response:
1. This is exactly the kind of discussion I would want to have in the perfect liberal arts college course.
2. Jeff is right that not all 鈥渃osts鈥� are meaningful. Any change in the status quo will impose a 鈥渃ost鈥� on someone else. I don鈥檛 have a right to demand compensation because my neighbor鈥檚 shiny new car makes me feel bad; as philosopher said once at an IHS conference we both attended in response to a criticism of income inequality, 鈥渆nvy is a vice.鈥� Along these lines, . Murray Rothbard offers a clear treatment of a number of cases in . I applied some of these principles to the immigration debate .
3. I don鈥檛 think principles can depend on political context. In short, we can鈥檛 be voice-of-the-people deliberative democrats when Our Team is in power and checks-and-balances strict constructionists when Their Team is. Even if we want to be strictly utilitarian about it, we have to be mindful of unintended consequences. The power we鈥檙e enjoying today will probably be used against us tomorrow.
Rights like private property and religious freedom also can鈥檛 be unalienable for Our Team and dependent on a cost/benefit test for Their Team. Over the summer, I discussed how this was particularly evident in , during which principles like private property rights and religious freedom were being attacked by those who claim to hold them most dear.
4. A lot of opponents of gay marriage base their opposition on alleged social costs, but the arguments I鈥檝e heard are almost all speculative. I鈥檇 be interested in good estimates of the net effect of gay marriage on government finance and economic growth. As Jeff points out, the cost is almost certainly trivial, and I would suspect that there are good reasons to think it鈥檚 positive.
5. Perspective matters. One of my favorite books is Bryan Caplan鈥檚 , which I鈥檓 going to assign in my Public Choice class in the Fall. Here鈥檚 , and . One of Caplan鈥檚 points is that there is an enormous gap between voters鈥� perceptions of the percentage of the federal budget devoted to foreign aid (very large) and the reality (very small). Caplan discusses 鈥渁nti-foreign bias鈥� at length; 鈥渇oreign鈥� can be anyone other than 鈥渕embers of my tribe.鈥�
All of this leaves me tempted to take .
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