Rights Are Not Privileges

The fact that the individual rights of blacks have often been ignored in the United States while the rights of whites have generally been respected does not reduce the rights of whites to “privileges.” The actual logical inference is that the rights of all must be respected.

Reducing the rights of whites to “privileges” means that they can be revoked at the whim of government officials. The American Revolution was fought precisely in order to prevent such a thing.

Today, there are whites and blacks with privilege. Hillary Clinton and Hunter Biden are examples. They apparently have the privilege of engaging in illegal behavior without legal consequences.

The members of BLM and “Antifa” have the privilege of robbing and looting stores, setting buildings on fire, and assaulting and killing police officers, without suffering legal penalties.

If I had privilege, which I do not, I would use it to slap the face and kick the rear of anyone who told me that my unalienable individual rights were mere privileges that mobs and/or politicians could justly revoke.

To learn more, read my essay “Capitalism: The Cure for Racism,” available for 99¢ at https://amzn.to/3fL4xoK 

WOULD HILLARY’S ELECTION VIOLATE THE TWO-TERM LIMIT?

Hillary Clinton may win the Democratic Party’s nomination and go on from there to be elected President of the United States. If that happens, her husband, William Jefferson Clinton, who was President of the United States from 1993 to 2001 for two full terms, would once again be a principal occupant of the White House.

As Hillary’s spouse, not only exercising the normal substantial influence of one spouse over the other but also being in possession of eight years of actual experience in the Presidency, it would appear that Bill Clinton would thus once again effectively exercise Presidential Powers. Yet this would be in substantive violation of the Twenty-Second Amendment to the United States Constitution, which states that “No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice . . . .”

True enough, Bill would not have been elected more than twice, and thus his presence and activities in the White House would not technically be in violation of the Constitution. But the obvious purpose of the Twenty-Second Amendment was to limit the occupation of the Office of President, and the exercise of the powers of that Office, to two terms. Its authors did not contemplate marriage as a route to the powers of the Presidency alternative to election to that Office.

If and to the extent that Mrs. Clinton’s chances of election increase, the couple needs to find a way to guarantee that Mr. Clinton would not in fact be a three or four-term President.

This article is copyright © 2007, by George Reisman. George Reisman is the author of Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics (Ottawa, Illinois: Jameson Books, 1996) and is Pepperdine University Professor Emeritus of Economics.