One of the most important concepts in the life of any society is rights. These could be so-called human rights, property rights, copyrights, and many other rights. But if we ask where all these rights come from, we are often told that the state is their source. That is, the definition and maintenance of rights actually fall within the functions of the body that declares a “monopoly” on its power and on the use of violence in society.
What, then, is the actual essence of the concept of rights in reality? The answer is simple—this concept is identical to the concept of privilege. Thus, under state power, you have freedom of speech only because you have been granted a privilege to do so. Your property is not actually yours—you have merely been granted the privilege to own and use it. You can practice a certain profession or run your own business only by virtue of permission granted from above. And this list can be continued almost indefinitely, as any of your rights and freedoms are actually just privileges from a stationary bandit.
States around the world have repeatedly and explicitly demonstrated that there are no rights, only privileges that people can easily lose. Over time, many types of activities have become heavily regulated, people’s property has been seized repeatedly, people have been deprived of their freedoms repeatedly, and people were forbidden from using anything other than “sovereign” money as a means of exchange; these are just a few examples of such deprivation of privileges. Currently, the privileged nature of state rights, and especially property rights, can be clearly observed in the example of Russia. Companies that have suspended operations in the country face the seizure of their assets; all foreign citizens from “unfriendly states” were first deprived of copyrights and patent rights, and then of the rights to buy and sell real estate altogether. As for freedom of speech and activity, it was taken away even from people in seemingly extremely liberal and democratic countries—for example, when harsh coercive measures were applied in Australia and Canada against people unwilling to share certain state COVID restrictions. And this list can also be continued almost indefinitely.
Even if we imagine a perfectly democratic state that still relies on the instrument of violence, the rights emanating from it would also be privileges. In such a case, determining which privileges the organ of violence will grant to people and which it will take away from them for each specific issue would be decided by the opinion of the majority. Ultimately, due to the inevitable difference in opinions and the varying composition of the majority on different issues, all people would again find themselves subject to privileges. Moreover, in real life, the situation is even worse, since perfectly democratic stationary bandits do not even exist.
For clarity in understanding the essence of currently existing rights, they should be called specifically privileges, since there is effectively no difference between these concepts. Such a difference will arise only when violence is eradicated as a method of managing social life, and indeed as a way of conducting human relations in general, as a result of which right will become not a subject of policy maintained by violence, but a subject of voluntary contract and agreement between people.
