“Human rights”, which don’t “exist” but are a handy legal construct, always used to be very simple. They were enshrined in law, and by calling them “rights” we gave them the aura of special status, not to be taken away by future politicians.

They included the right to life, the right to free speech, etc. They were simple and easy to enforce. They didn’t cost much: only a legal system.

But then people started saying that these were only a subset of rights, called “negative rights”, and there were other rights called “positive rights” which previously hadn’t been recognised. These included the “right to education” and the “right to healthcare”.

The crucial difference is that positive rights cost money. There’s no such thing as free education: it has to be paid for, e.g. by taxes. So you can only get positive rights by taking money from other people.

That doesn’t mean positive rights are necessarily bad. But it must be recognised that they can only exist by forcibly taking money from other people. (Taxation is “extortion with menaces”.) Failure to recognise this leads to a lack of respect for public services (bad as they are). If, whenever you visit hospital, you remember that it is all paid for from other people’s hard work, you realise what a privilege it is to live in England where this is possible.

Whether “positive rights” are rights or not, they are certainly a privilege, funded by other people’s hard work.

The problem with positive rights is that they are a ratchet. People always want more, and a government can always buy a little short-term success by increasing taxes and increasing what some people get for free (and what other people pay for). Those that stand to gain always shout louder than those who stand to lose.

When the NHS was founded, the services they provided were small, though similar to contemporary private medicine. As new treatments are invented or discovered, these are added to what is available. The bill rises. The NHS now provides all manner of things that have nothing to do with what people need, but with what they merely want, including non-medical plastic surgery, fertility treatment (nothing to do with healthcare), and pseudoscience (homeopathy or magnetic bandages, anyone?).

It provides treatments costing tens of thousands of pounds. Because with finite resources it cannot provide everything, there is the amusingly named NICE (National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence), whose job is the necessary but not nice task of deciding what to spend the money on. If someone needs a £100,000 drug to treat their cancer, they probably won’t get it because that £100,000 could do much more good if spent on lots of other people.

So here’s another problem with “positive rights”: they’re not necessarily even possible. Does someone have a “right” to a particular drug, if 50 years ago it didn’t exist, and certainly would have been unaffordable if it was? Would they have had the right to it 50 years ago if it was unaffordable? Would they have had the right to it 50 years ago if it didn’t exist?

Does someone have the right to a £100,000 drug now if the money could save more lives elsewhere? The phrase “right to life” always used to mean “right not to be killed”. Negative rights are all about stopping other people doing things to you, not forcing them to do things for you like “positive rights”. However, consider the recent case of Ann Marie Rogers, who tried to claim that by not paying for Herceptin (an expensive cancer drug) the NHS had violated her “right to life”. Clearly “right to life” had been redefined, from the old negative right not to be killed, to an absurd positive right to have one’s life sustained at all costs. Negative rights have a clear infringer. Positive rights don’t clearly specify who is to pay for what is demanded: just a vague “everyone”, through taxation.

Why was the NHS rather than anyone else accused of violating this woman’s claimed “right to life”? Would her right to life have been violated if she had an untreatable illness and was going to die within days? If so, by whom?

Another claimed right is the “right to (’free’) education”. At present, state education is paid for through taxation. But we all recognise that once you have learnt a certain amount, you have to go off in to the world and earn a living.

You do not have the right to stay in education for the rest of your life, at other people’s expense. If everyone did that, there wouldn’t be any education because no one would be working to pay for it. If everyone exercised their positive rights, no one would get anything.

There is not, for example, a right to go to university to be taught about medieval art history.

What is the cut-off point? Does the state have a duty to teach you calculus if you’re good enough, or should it just teach you basic arithmetic?

The possible justification of tax-funded education is that we will be better off economically and/or socially if everyone can do basic arithmetic. That doesn’t mean it is a right. We might also be better off in a society where some people know about medieval art history. But that doesn’t mean our taxes should pay for it, and it doesn’t mean it is a right.

Clearly positive rights can be absurd. We should drop the phrase, recognising that talk of rights is not necessary for attempts to justify taxation to spend on things like the NHS and education. The “merit goods” argument does just as well, and doesn’t attempt to justify things like government-funded medieval art history.

The nature of debt, and our attitude to it, has changed significantly since the nineteenth century. While the debtors’ prison used to spark fear into people’s minds, we are now, in Britain, living with a £1.3 trillion debt mountain. The cause of this change to the perception of debt can be traced to growing affluence allowing people to have mortgages, and the creation of the Welfare State leading to the entitlement mentality.

To assess the modern debt culture, it is necessary to consider how people’s attitudes to debt have changed. In the late-seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when banking and credit systems developed most people were too poor to gain credit. As such, there grew a popular image that only dishonest businessmen and the feckless upper classes were able to fall into debt.
This attitude toward debt changed in the late twentieth century as more people were able to gain credit. With growing affluence and the desire to own one’s own home, mortgage debt became more common. Thus, debt lost its association with the greedy and frivolous as it became just as common among hard working families. However, because debt was no longer stigmatised, people were able to abuse credit systems for their own self-indulgence.

The idea of using credit to support a lifestyle beyond one’s means is derived from the culture of entitlement that began with the creation of the Welfare State. The Welfare State is based on the idea that everyone has an equal entitlement to certain things, most notably, education and health care. However, this precedent has led some people to believe that they are ‘entitled’ to a standard of living that is beyond their means. Thus, credit is seen as a right because it liberates people from the limits their income places on their lifestyle. The most common example of this is mortgages. Although house prices have outstripped the increase in real wages, people remain unwilling to accept that they cannot afford the same quality of house as they may have done ten years ago. The result is more excessive debt.

Of course, this is not the only reason. In addition, the credit card has transformed the way people view money. Instead of conducting transactions directly with real currency, people are now paying virtually. The result is that people’s perception of their wealth and their spending is reduced. Moreover, it can be argued that banks and loan companies have accentuated the problem of debt by offering larger loans to those who cannot afford the repayments. Nevertheless, this must not distract us from the central fact that excessive debt and its social acceptance is a manifestation of the modern culture of entitlement.

On one level, the process of changing people’s attitude to excessive debt and its acceptability has already begun. There are increasing signs that the economic climate is changing for the worse. In structural terms, a debt-based economy relies on liquidity in order to pay off, and take out, loans quickly and efficiently. Thus, the recent ‘credit crunch’ and its adverse effects, most notably on Northern Rock, demonstrates the flaws of a debt-based economy. Moreover, the Citizen Advice Bureau has pointed out that the number of people making debt enquiries has doubled in ten years to 6,600 every day. In all, people are increasingly aware that excessive debt breeds instability and cannot be supported in a period of economic turmoil.

Nevertheless, it must be appreciated that changing the mentality of entitlement is key. This is a long process with no certain means of implementation. However, in general, people need to be instilled with a sense of social responsibility. This can only be achieved by making people realise that they cannot rely on the government to solve all of their problems, but that sometimes they need to use their own initiative. We need to do away with the ‘people dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good’ as described by T.S. Eliot.

In conclusion, as mortgage debt became more common, debt in general lost its stigma. Some people were then able to abuse this liberal attitude to debt by borrowing money to live the lifestyle to which they thought themselves entitled; a mentality derived from the Welfare State. The solution is to make people appreciate that they cannot support excessive debt in a period of economic instability, of which it itself is a cause. Moreover, more generally, it is necessary to combat the mentality of entitlement by instilling a concept of social responsibility.