Image citation: Greg Rosenke’s Earth picture, licenced under Unsplash
Are rights inherent, and thus, do they constitute a presumption of how others should treat individuals, or are rights mere permissions from those with power, dispensations that may be given or withheld by those holding power? Free societies require the equal presumption of liberty, which requires that any prohibitions imposed on the exercise of liberty be justified, whereas the exercise of liberty does not require justification. Just as in a court of law those accused of crimes (and thus liable to loss of liberty) are not required to prove their innocence and the prosecutor must prove that the accused is guilty, restricting someone’s liberty requires justification, whereas its exercise (whether to pray as one chooses or to buy or sell as one wishes) does not. You need not explain to and then request permission from the authorities to realize your choice to wear blue sneakers or brown loafers, to eat potatoes fried or baked, or to listen to classical music, country and western, or Lady Gaga.
The American abolitionist and political thinker Frederick Douglass, in his 1867 “Composite Nation” speech, stated,
There are such things in the world as human rights. They rest upon no conventional foundation, but are eternal, universal and indestructible.
Among these is the right of locomotion; the right of migration; the right which belongs to no particular race, but belongs to all and to all alike. It is the right you assert by staying here, and your fathers asserted by coming here.
The presumption of liberty is embedded in America’s Founding documents. The rights of individuals are, as those documents make clear, unenumerated and thus presumed, whereas the powers of government are expressly stated (i.e., enumerated) and thus limited. The Bill of Rights enumerates certain familiar rights, while the Ninth Amendment makes it clear that those enumerated rights are not all we have, as it would be impossible to “enumerate all the rights of the people”:
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
In contrast, the Constitution states that all laws must be both “necessary and proper,” and the Tenth Amendment states that the powers of government are delegated, enumerated, and as such, the only powers they have:
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
The right to come and go, to converse with whom we wish, to exchange with others on mutually agreeable terms, and more are presumed rights of human beings. Any who would restrict a person from interacting voluntarily with people of another religion or language, county or country, must bear the burden of justifying such restrictions. Some restrictions are readily justified, such as restricting divulging or trading in defense secrets that would put all at risk of invasion or prohibiting the exchange of stolen goods or the products of forced labor. But protecting the interests of established producers of children’s socks is not a sufficient justification to restrict people from buying socks for their children’s feet from producers in other cities or countries.
The principles of exchange for mutual advantage do not vary when one party speaks English and another Spanish, or when one is Christian and the other Buddhist, or when one lives in Missouri and the other in Manitoba. They are global. About the year 420 BCE the philosopher Democritus of Abdera wrote, “To a wise man, the whole earth is open; for the native land of a good soul is the whole earth.” The people of Hangzhou, the capital of the Southern Song dynasty of China, had a famous saying: “Vegetables from the east, water from the west, wood from the south, and rice from the north.” People can be attached to places, as most of us are, and still purchase goods and services from outside their localities, as we all do. Some may choose to stay rooted in one place and find happiness there, whereas others choose to travel or to relocate, sometimes to avoid oppression, sometimes to seek new opportunities. Whether one stays or moves from Boston to Los Angeles or from Los Angeles to Tokyo is a decision for the person doing the staying or moving. People can trade goods, services, or ideas with their next-door neighbors or with people who live far away.
Restricting the liberty of people to travel or exchange information, ideas, goods, or services requires justification. The burden of proof lies with the party that would restrict the liberty of another, just as the burden of proof in a criminal case lies with the one making the charge (the prosecutor). In contrast, the immorality of arrogating to oneself the power to restrict the choices of others is more evident: it violates the presumption of equal liberty that is foundational to free, harmonious, and prosperous societies by presuming instead that some people be required to ask permission to act from some privileged class. At the very least, such assertions require more justification than is generally offered by advocates of restrictions on trade, travel, or the exchange of goods, services, and ideas.
There is evidence that our commonly accepted norms of morality emerge from trade, which established the importance of legitimate expectations and reputations, both of which are necessary for the emergence of law and morality. Morality itself is a product of exchange, and the more trade, generally the more humane a society is.
This piece was originally published in the Cato Institute’s Globalization: Then and Now in 2024 under the title “The Moral Case for Globalization”. It is republished on Bastiat Scrolls with the author’s permission, in recognition of its continued relevance to today’s debates on globalisation.
