The Conservative Cat

The existence of two types of human rights can be traced back to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whose four freedoms included two conservative rights (freedom of speech and freedom of worship) and two liberal ones (freedom from want and freedom from fear).

In the ensuing years, freedom of worship has morphed into a liberal right. Rather than being able to choose your own church, it's become the expectation that you will not be offended by seeing someone else's religion on government property.

Liberals still believe in freedom of speech, so long as it isn't used to get specific politicians elected, but even in that limited sense it takes a back seat to the expectation that you'll never hear racially offensive words.

This is a problem, because a conservative right is fairly easy to enforce: you don't arrest people who exercise their rights. A liberal right, on the other hand, requires a vast engine of government bureaucracy to make sure that expectations are met. For example, the expectation of a good education cost $73.8 billion in the 2004 fiscal year, and even then you don't have to look very hard to find liberals who think the job isn't getting done. It's worth noting that the liberal solution to educational problems is to increase the ability of bureaucrats to interfere in local schools. It is never to allow people more choices. Choice is a purely conservative solution.

Why is this distinction between conservative and liberal rights important? Because when your children are in high school they're going to be told that conservatives believe in tradition, while liberals believe in individual rights. What they're not going to be told is that many of those rights involve an ever-bigger government taking more of your money so it can be sure liberals always get what they expect.

And one of those things they expect is that your children never figure out the difference between liberal and conservative rights.

Respectfully submitted,

Ferdinand T. Cat