Saturday, August 28, 2021

Group Rights versus Individual Rights

 When you want to control a complex social situation, the first thing you do is make categories and award privileges. But, as in any statist system, for every entitlement there is an equal and opposite obligation. When, in the flush of class action, entitlements are compassionately granted to groups, obligations are cruelly drawn from individuals. Over all, the state is the decisive arbiter. Its power increases as it manufactures new rights and new relations, shifting them in an ever-changing shell game in which players have the illusion that they are winning but it is the dealer who goes home with the money.

- From "Diversity is Not a Virtue" - an essay by Mark Helprin in Reinventing the American People: Unity and Diversity Today, edited by Robert Royal (1995)

No comments: