If one person has a right to something he did not earn, of necessity it requires that another person not have a right to something that he did earn.
Interpretation
The quote highlights the conflict between rights and earned benefits, suggesting that unfairness occurs when one person's rights infringe on another's rightful possessions.
Walter E. Williams emphasizes the inherent injustice in claiming entitlements that one has not earned, suggesting that such claims inherently take away rights from others who have rightfully earned their possessions. This highlights a fundamental principle in discussions about fairness, property rights, and individual responsibility in society, where one individual's gain can often result in another's loss when rights are redistributed without regard for merit.
In practice
This quote can be used in a debate about welfare policies.
However, if we wish to be compassionate with our fellow man, we must learn to engage in dispassionate analysis. In other words, thinking with our hearts, rather than our brains, is a surefire method to hurt those whom we wish to help.
In a free society, government has the responsibility of protecting us from others, but not from ourselves.
What we call the market is really a democratic process involving millions, and in some markets billions, of people making personal decisions that express their preferences. When you hear someone say that he doesn't trust the market, and wants to replace it with government edicts, he's really calling for a switch from a democratic process to a totalitarian one.
The true test of one's commitment to liberty and private property rights doesn't come when we permit people to be free to do those voluntary things with which we agree. The true test comes when we permit people to be free to do those voluntary things with which we disagree.
Powerful government tends to draw into it people with bloated egos, people who think they know more than everyone else and have little hesitance in coercing their fellow man. Or as Nobel Laureate Friedrich Hayek said, "in government, the scum rises to the top".
The essence of government is force, and most often that force is used to accomplish evil ends.
Coercion, after all, merely captures man. Freedom captivates him.
The grief of the keen is no personal complaint for the death of one woman over eighty years, but seems to contain the whole passionate rage that lurks somewhere in every native of the island.
As I approached my 95th birthday, I was burdened to write a book that addressed the epidemic of 'easy believism.' There is a mindset today that if people believe in God and do good works, they are going to Heaven.
If the descent is thus sometimes performed in sorrow, it can also take place in joy.
That this individual life of all of us is not something limited in its temporal expression to the life that now we experience, follows from the very fact that here nothing final or individual is found expressed.
When individuals and nations have once got in their heads the abstract concept of full-blown liberty, there is nothing like it in its uncontrollable strength.
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