“Free-speech rights or property rights are therefore justified or not by their relative importance to individuals that exercise them. Given the uneven distribution of property and the universality of speech, freedom of speech logically becomes a far more important right than property rights in this vision. Free-speech rights are thus entitled to sweeping exemptions from interventions of public authority, but not so property rights.” - Thomas Sowell, A Conflict of Visions, page 210.
One then must ask oneself: setting aside for the moment the concept of equality of rights regarding man, what about the equality regarding the rights in and of themselves? Is one “right”, as defined by the US Constitution for example, more important than another right? Are each of the enumerated rights treated as having equality of rights among themselves or what one might describe as equal weight? If one assigns differing equality or weight to differing rights is that not discrimination among the rights?
Returning to Sowell’s observation, freedom of speech receives an abundance of attention and rightfully so. However, private property rights have been abrogated, intruded upon, regulated, removed, compromised, etc. over the past two centuries. Right to bear arms? All the other enumerated rights? How have these other rights been treated?
Hence we have the proposition of equality of rights regarding man yet the underlying rights themselves have no equality. How can one achieve equality of rights regarding man if the underlying rights suffer discrimination regarding equality? Consequently, the proposition of equality of rights regarding man, is best described as equality of discriminatory rights regarding man.
If the underlying rights are in and of themselves equal, that is, a series of equally weighted rights bestowed, and man has this series of equally weighted rights to rely upon, then equality of rights regarding man would be in fact based from beginning to end on equality.
Since we know for a fact that intervention has indeed occurred, and what was a series of equal rights have become a series of unequally weighted rights, the rights obviously become unequal due to intervention by man. The intervention was not by all men, intervention was achieved by some men.
Therefore, we do not have all people wanting all people to have all rights of equal weight, rather we have some people wanting all people to have equality of rights albeit the rights are those rights as determined by some people.
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