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Responding to Bill Easterly’s claim that poverty is not a human rights violation Wilkinson engages in a fair bit of intellectual gymnastics to conclude that the basic problem is that we have states (as in independent nations, for my more financial minded readers) at all. This is unnecessary. The argument against poverty alleviation as a human seems clear and compelling to me. I think Wilkinson begins to veer off track when he says.

There is a human right to property, I believe. But the definition of legitimate property rights and the criteria for identifying their violation are also vague. I don’t think that means we should not recognize property rights.

In many cases, it is clear who has violated a property right. Maybe it was a thief. Maybe it was the state. But what do we say when, for example, an otherwise well-functioning democratic state fails to recognize a property right because almost all of its citizens do not recognize it? Almost everyone supports certain kinds of eminent domain without truly just compensation, say. And so a bit of my back 40 is confiscated to build a road.  Who has violated my property right by refusing to recognize and enforce it? You can say it’s “the state,” but that’s already a corporate body and not a natural person. Who is that really? And in this make-believe case “the state” really is just acting as an agent of “the people”–of most of them, at least. My guess is that Easterly is uncomfortable with the idea that a rights violation can be so diffuse, that responsibility can be so broadly distributed, and that there is no easily identifiable perpetrator. But I think that’s the way it is. That’s one of the dangers of democracy: it makes the diffusion of criminal responsibility easy.

Well then. Let’s back up though. What’s the problem with the “state” being the violator here? The state is not a natural person sure, but why does that matter? The state is an agent. Philosophically, agents violate rights. I don’t see how being natural, artificial or corporate really has anything to do with it.

However, if one wants to insist on rights violations being personal and human we don’t have to stop there. The proximate violator of Wilkinson’s rights is the bulldozer operator who comes to tear up his back 40. For suppose that Wilkinson’s land is “confiscated” but no one ever does anything about it. No one comes to take possession of it. No one restricts him in his use of it. No one prevents him from selling it at full value.

In that case the rights violation is moot. It is moot because no one has actually done anything to Wilkinson and therein lies the rub. For your rights to be violated, ultimately someone or some entity has to be doing something to you. Those violations have to be making you worse off than you would be if they left you alone. For me that is the acid test. If you could make this problem go away by never having any contact or relations with person X again then person X is violating your rights. Ultimately, your fundamental right is the right to be left alone.